Strange Seed News

We’re well into the phase where the game starts to feel pretty cohesive. Here’s our new “forest hallway” environment that I haven’t yet added to the Steam screenshots:



Some of the tasks that went into making our new environments included:

• A fully featured lighting and shadow system
  
• New shaders for all vegetation and environment objects
  
• Completing the climbing system
  
• A bunch of new vegetation models made in Speedtree
  

The challenge is getting these environments to work well on lower-end computers.

I’m testing on my old Nvidia 1060 laptop and they’re stable at >30 FPS; I wonder if anyone with a lower end rig will be wanting to play? Luckily there is still some low-hanging fruit left for optimization.

[h3]The quest system[/h3]
The other major feature we’re working on polishing right now is a quest system. After some back and forth about how to code the quests, we settled on a pretty powerful system using a visual scripting system, via a 3rd party package.

We've successfully put together a quest that involves grabbing a hat for the Queen Ant. Maybe you'll get to wear the hat afterward...?

Finally, a grab bag of other things we’ve been working on:

• Set up permanently flying creatures (like bees)
  
• Implemented a wrapper scene and sub-scene switcher that should both ease our workflow and make the game more stable
  
• Investigated and fixed various weird results from unexpected part combos
  
• Added a “treasure chest” feature tied to completing enemy encounters
  

Is a demo ever coming? Well, the game is nearly ready for it! … but, we kept putting off final polish on the movement system. Early playtesting surfaced a few bugs in that area, so we’re spending time stomping those out before doing a fully public demo.

I think we’ll be ready in a couple months (probably after Steam Next Fest, because releasing a demo in that time frame without being in the Fest is a bad idea). That said, if you want in on pre-public playtesting, DM me or join the Discord.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading and following Strange Seed!

October was a very productive month for us! Strange Seed is beginning to feel very “playable”, even though there’s much work left to be done.

[h3]Combat lock-on[/h3]
Combat feels completely different with this change: locking-on to enemies. This includes an auto-rotate to attack and auto camera rotation while moving around.

[h3]New creatures: ant and bee[/h3]
😀

[h3]Controllers (of all types!) enabled[/h3]
Pretty much everything should work now! I’m a controller-first guy and being able to constantly test Strange Seed using a controller is a huge, positive change for me.

… actually, I haven’t tried playing with a joystick or rhythm game accessory yet, so I can’t claim “everything” 😅 Let’s just say, any typical game controller.

[h3]Controller: ranged attack hold to aim[/h3]
Once we had the controller in, we realized that ranged attacks need a special control scheme when there’s no mouse. With a mouse, you just click wherever you want to attack. With the controller, hold L1 and move the joystick to position the landing zone. (This makes me want to play Valkyria Chronicles again…)

[h3]Final word[/h3]
Originally I thought we’d have a rough demo out by now, but the plan was to have very incomplete combat mechanics. When it came down to it, combat felt so central to the game that we needed to work on polishing it before the demo.

So that’s what we’re doing right now — in November, we’ll be running some private playtests of combat in greybox levels, ensuring that our attack timing, movement scheme, encounter design and so forth is really solid.

Thanks for reading!

This month we added a material and color user interface. Every creature has its own skin, and now that skin can be applied to others and recolored. Here's a quick video:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

… I have a personal compulsion to make everything neon, but normal colors work just fine too.

This was pretty complex to set up because of all the small details: tying into our evolve system; making decisions for sub-parts and special cases; and accounting for a variety of shaders. All that said, the feature was completed within the allotted time (there are still future improvements to make, of course).

Other things we completed this month:

• New creatures: tortoise and snake
  
• Performance testing and work within scenes to improve FPS for low-end devices
  
• Some dance animations (just for fun… for now)
  
• Continued improvements on AI movement via the NavMesh
  
• Started on ambient enviro sounds, bugfixes for existing creature sounds
  

Headed into October, we’re working on controller implementation, combat polish, and some new environments. By the end of the month, we'll also revamp our Steam store page with a bunch of new assets -- exciting!

Thanks for reading!

Happy Labor Day everyone! In August we began kicking the tires on some existing systems, making sure the foundation is solid going into the second half of developing Strange Seed.

Here are some of the major tasks we completed:

• New player/enemy creatures: pig and failed evolve slimes (enemy only)
  

• Added NavMesh-based enemy AI / navigation and more AI behaviors
  
• Improved the look and timing of ranged and area attacks
  
• Exhaustively investigated various potential refactorings to our ground collision system
  
• Completely revised and replaced our evolution UI and HUD styling
  
• Studied performance: on most of our dev machines, the game runs at 60fps or well above that, but on a couple older laptops, it’s experiencing drops under 30fps; this appears to be mainly an issue with draw calls, which means it’s very solvable by offering alternate performance options for lower-end machines
  
• Evaluated and tested various occlusion and frustrum culling methods to get higher FPS across all devices
  

Overall I’m pretty happy with the results of our refactoring and reevaluation of the core systems. In early August I found myself feeling semi-panicked about the quality of collisions in the game — not based so much on anything that was actually going wrong, but more on what might go wrong in the future. (Hey, I just get nervous sometimes, alright!?)

As a result, I got together with my engineer Felix and we evaluated a bunch of potential options. First, for the ground collisions, we considered replacing an existing torso-based system with a per-foot system, which would also change up how we did walk and run animations.

In the end we got together with our artist, Jhulian, and did a team evaluation of the old system versus the new idea. And as a group we decided… our existing system is actually the best option! This might sound like a story that goes nowhere (hah) but for me, it was a great moment; it means we’re on the right track.

We actually did end up changing the attack collision system, to use primitive colliders (mainly capsules and spheres) to register combat hits. That’s a fairly standard system for 3d games and for us, it worked perfectly from the first test.



As a last word, when I was writing this post I realized that a comic from a book on gamedev (by Matt Hackett) described this month perfectly:



We clearly spent August in the Slog Swamp — except for Jhulian, who spent half his time on Content Mountain. Our team has been working together for years now with various finished projects under our belts, so the Swamp isn’t nearly as uncomfortable as it used to be. It’s actually a fairly satisfying place, when you manage to make some progress.

See you next month!

This month we made a ton of progress on the fine details of the creature system — including special poses like climbing, tweaking odd size and part combinations, fixing physics issues, and improving combat.

Going into August, we’ll continue making some improvements to the character rig and ground collision. Polishing these was initially planned for later; however, to ensure that we deliver a great demo, we’ve moved them up.

[h2]Finished in July:
[/h2]

• New creatures: geoduck and monkey (both ranged attackers)
  
• Special setup for ranged attacks: rules around attacking near / far, attacking slanted surfaces like cliffs, and projectile trails
  
• Switched up how we detect hits to be much more accurate
  
• Fixed wing rotation to avoid clipping through torso
  
• New attack VFX for all creatures (we switched from animations to a Trail Renderer)
  
• Allowed arms or legs to ragdoll if they can’t reach the ground… by the way, this is hilarious:
  
• Enemies: Fixed various navigation and behavior errors
  
• Enemies: No more insta-aggroing the entire zone, and reset properly on player death
  
• Enemies: Added combat music! Thanks to Donahue Industries for that.
  
• Player creature: Added a summed stats panel to the evolve UI
  
• Player creature: Fixed how some parts display in the UI
  
• Player creature: Drowning when underwater
  

[h2]Coming up in August (partial list):[/h2]

• Updates to rig and collision (already mentioned above)
  
• Complete UI overhaul to replace our initial placeholders
  
• Nailing down combat stats for initial creatures and enemies
  
• Improving on ranged enemy attacks (melee comes first in this game, but ranged weapons do exist!)
  

See you for the next update!