Dinolords News

[p]All aboard for a cute and fluffy announcement in this edition of Dinolords CatMatch Diamond Saga Monthly!

Prior to today, we were all hard at work making a 'hack-n-strat' game called Dinolords, but truth be told none of us were even remotely excited about the game, not did we really think anyone was interested in it, so we had some long meetings over the weekend that included plenty of beverages and came up with a new plan.

Right, with no further ado, we hereby present what we are pivoting Dinolords into - presenting CatMatch Diamond Saga!!!

In this new direction, we follow some fluffy new friends on their journey to match yarn skeins in a classic match-3 gameplay, but wait, there's more!

Long gone are the big scary dinosaurs and cruel vikings of yesterday, and action packed gameplay is a thing of the past - you must now take care of a farm, with time-gated idle-game mechanics that forces you to check in multiple times a day to sow, water and harvest crops to feed your purring fluffy friends in the cat village!

Follow your friends villages, open mystery crates with cosmetic items (crate keys sold seperately), level up a seasonal fur-pass and find cute and wonderful items to customize your fuzzy friends!

Open up the gates to a soft and furry world of magical friendship!

Overturn the evil dog villain by completing levels on the near-endless level-ladder with a time-gated energy system (additional energy purchased seperately)!

Let love win, and fluff prevail, in... CatMatch Diamond Saga!

See you in Fluffingville![/p][p]-panxter[/p]

[p]It is the end of February, and that means technically we are leaving winter behind and spring is upon us. We are in Denmark though, so that is not really the case in practice, but the thought still counts!
That also means it is time for another edition of Dinolords Monthly!

This month we are looking at some new art and UI improvements that has made it into the game, as well as talking about our trip to Copenhagen Gaming Week!

[/p][h2]Tomorrow's Awesome Games Showcase[/h2][p]Calling it a trip might be a bit of an overstatement, as it was practically in the same neighbourhood as our new office, but we ent to Copenhagen Gaming Week's Tomorrow's Awesome Games Showcase (TAGS for short).
We brought a build of the game to the show floor with one level, The level was straight up just the current state of the game, and not tailored towards a convention experience. Usually, when we have shown off the game in previous iterations, we have created a small, condensed level specifically made to take 10 minutes to complete from start to finish, as this seems to be a sort of sweet spot where people have time to get a sense for the experience we want them to have, but also does not sit and play for so long that other people can't have a go.
This version took more like 40 minutes, and a lot of people had a blast playing from start to finish. It was such a joy to see people interact with the game and have fun playing it!

We also really wanted to have some stickers printed for the event to hand out. Unfortunately, they arrived in the mail 3 days after the event had ended. So now we have 500 super cool Dinolords stickers ready for the next thing we will attend.

We also want to say a big thanks to everyone who visited our booth, it was great meeting you all and sharing our excitement about Dinolords with you!

[/p][h2]New Art[/h2][p]We want to share some of the unit paintings made by Pablo. These are used in cropped form for unit representation in various parts of the UI like your warband or barracks. Pablo absolutely nailed the vibe we remember from strategy games of our youth, have a look:

Philip has been making some landmarks in the form of runestones, they look almost too good:


[/p][h2]Fighting the good fight[/h2][p]Or, I guess "good" is in the eye of the beholder, maybe the Vikings would prefer less resistance..
Anyway, combat in the game is seeing a lot of iteration currently, and we are discovering and playing around with a bunch of things to make combat both interesting and satisfying. We want there to be a good amount of skill expression in combat, so it is something you can be good at or get better at, where a combination of your skill and your lords abilities and stats both affect the outcome.
Put in a different way, we do not want combat to be purely a numbers game or feel like you're just comparing numbers on a spreadsheet.

One of the things we are trying out is execution/finisher moves where, if a larger enemy is downed, you can take them out in a glorious finishing move, sure to improve legion morale and discipline! We are currently experimenting with having this heal you (and possible your units) to provide an edge in combat, all of this is of course subject to change, but it needs to be both cool and impactful.
Here's a short recording of a raptor being sent to the shadow realm:


Additionally, we are working on the feel of combat, many small tweaks and additions all work together to make combat feel juicy and make every hit feel impactful and cool!
Check out this small gif where the enemy animation is tweaked and fine tuned:


[/p][h2]That's all, folks![/h2][p]That concludes this Dinolords Monthly.
We have been exploring and experimenting a lot this month, and a lot of pieces are falling in place. There's been long design meetings, discussions that lead to good solutions, and also a few funny debates like; could a knight ride a deinonychus - our conclusion is no, but a brute could definitely manage two in chains.


Although this edition was slightly delayed, I hope you guys find some of the stuff we are working on just as exciting as we do.

Until next time![/p][p]-panxter[/p]

[p]New year, new Pterosaur!
Wait, no, is that how the saying goes?

Anyway, as the calendar year ticks up one and we all return from a well deserved Christmas break, we get right back to work on DInolords, and a bunch of cool stuff is going on right now.
In this monthly, we will have a look at some new 3D models and go on a bit of a technical journey into navmesh and the intricacies of making our own bespoke navmesh system for Dinolords.

[/p][h2]Dinolords Unscaled 7[/h2][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]In case you didn't know or hadn't seen yet, we put a new episode of our behind-the-scenes video series up on Youtube you can watch it here!
We finally give a tiny tour of our new - slightly smaller but much newer - office and Michael talk about some of the new combat-units that have made it into the game as well as a little reflection on a year of development past.

[/p][h2]Making the world 'lived in'[/h2][p]In Danish we say "Mange bække små gør en stor å", I guess the closest translation is "Little strokes fell great oaks", and making the world of Dinolords come alive and feel as it is actually lived in takes a bunch of effort. Loads of small touches ranging from making the layout of a level, placing just the right tree in a specific spot, to making and texturing the 3D models that can be found across the world make up a large bulk of work.
We want to start out by showcasing some of the things that might seem like small things in isolation, but in reality are key to making the world tangible.

Small cart in both a working and less-than-working condition.

One of these I'd be careful before using.

I wonder if this water is safe to drink?

A small boat that has clearly seen better days.

Models like the ones above really add a bunch of visually interesting elements to a level, but they also serve a more functional purpose. In a level that can be constantly changing with buildings being constructed or destroyed, trees getting cut down and walls be put up, having some sorts of 'landmarks' to help you navigate is critical so you don't have to consult the minimap every time you want to find your way back to a specific spot. It allows for much more fluid navigation of a level when you see something familiar and remember "Ah yeah, I had to go left at the old well", even if its subconscious.

Details and smaller objects like the ones above can also be thematic and help to convey a story, and for that we are going to need some Viking encampment gear:
Apart from the spear-rack, this looks cosy!

Having different 3D models, all carefully made by our 3D team, helps us create interesting encounters that feel much more real and like they are part of the world, as opposed to the crude gameplay-test setups I have been messing around with consisting of enemy units standing in the middle of nowhere just waiting for a Lord to run by to fight.

[/p][h2]Navigating treacherous terrain[/h2][p]All right, this next bit might get a little technical, but it is a super important integral part of Dinolords, and we are very proud of it so it definitely deserves its own segment here. But before we dig in, there is a little preface with some terminology and a description of some technical functionality we have to get through first - just to make sure we are all on the same page.

All the units, including the Lord (aka Agents), need to be able to move around in a level in a meaningful way; this means being able to walk from point A to point B while avoiding obstacles like trees and rivers, but being able to cross bridges or climb towers or ladders on walls. To achieve this, it's most common to use something called a Navmesh.

A navmesh visualisation

Imagine a large, blue blanket spread out over the entire landscape, with holes cut in it wherever there is some sort of obstacle like a tree, a building, a river, a rock etc. This would be the visualisation of the underlying data that makes up the navmesh.
By absolute magic wizardry, some arcane incantations can then use complicated math to calculate a route between a point A and a point B, based on various parameters like the shortest in distance. This is called pathfinding.

Now I will pass the torch to Ulrik, our lead programmer, who will take us along a journey into the depths of navmesh generation:

[/p][h3]"[/h3][p]After doing the prototype of the game using Unity’s built-in NavMesh system, and just kind of ignoring all the problems that came with it, we finally decided that it was time to build something real.
We had a few requirements for the system:
[/p]

1. [p]We needed a triangle mesh, not a grid. There’s a lot of grid based games out there, and we want the freedom to place buildings at whatever rotation we want. Also, building castle walls in a grid-based system just makes your castle turn into a box, and we want the freedom to build great castles.
   [/p]

[p]It needed to be accurate. We want to have bridges for units to cross over, and castle gates to pass through. It couldn’t be an approximation.
[/p][p]It needed to be fast to update. When we place down a wall, it needs to start blocking paths straight away.
[/p][p]It needed to support a fair number of units pathing and avoiding each other at the same time.
[/p][p]It needed to support big units, for obvious reasons.
[/p][p]It needed to be ready for networking.
[/p][p]We had a decision to take, on wether to build this system ourselves, or find something off the shelf. Using something someone else has build is a way to get done faster, at the risk of it not fulfilling all our requirements in exactly the way we want it, and having to work around that. In the end, we decided to take the plunge, and build our own system.

And that’s what we now have a 1.0 version of in the game. All the navmesh generation, pathing and avoidance are now our own system that we control. The navmesh will look at the terrain and all the obstacles on it, and dynamically update only the parts of it that has changed. It’s very fast to update, and the results are perfectly accurate. It’s built entirely on DOTS ECS, and is Burst compiled and multithreaded.

The way there was not easy, and it took a bunch of research into triangulation, avoidance/pathfinding/path funneling algorithms, DOTS entities and multithreading, and while there’s still features to be done and places for optimization, all the hard work has turned into a very well running system. For the technically curious crowd, we use chunked, constrained Delaunay triangulation to build the navmesh, using rectangle and polygonized circle obstacles to cut out features. When a unit moves, it uses a raycast through the navmesh to detect line-of-sight to its target, and if no direct path can be taken, it does a triangulation pathfind, to find the route through the triangles to the destination, and then runs a funneling algorithm to find the final path. To move, it then combines the vector pointing to the next waypoint with the vector from the RVO2 unit avoidance implementation to get the final movement vector. When the navmesh changes, all affected paths are recalculated. There are more pieces, like avoidance obstacles and navmesh links, but going into detail would need a whole blog post in and of itself.

On of the more challenging parts of building a system like this is finding an optimal path between two points. This is something that is rather easy in a normal grid-based system (why do we make this so hard for ourselves), but in a triangle-based system, it’s not as straight forward. A lot of scientific papers was read, trying to get a fast, optimal path calculation, that is optimized for this kind of game, and we still have the occasional issue of units really wanting to take the long way around building. This is strangely reminiscent of older RTS’s like the Warcraft I and II, where unit pathing definitely still wasn’t a solved problem. The reality is that, while we’ve gotten much further since then, both in terms of algorithms and computing power, it’s still not a completely solved problem; there is not just that one solution that you just use. But really, the most complicated part is just putting all the pieces together in a way that works, and is performant.

There’s a lot of pieces that goes into getting a system like that to work, and each piece is like a whole project in and of itself. There are still a few pieces missing, like weighted paths, to make unit path around places that will slow them down, but the most important thing is that we now have a working system, that we can customize to our needs. If we want to do a special unit, that needs custom pathing or avoidance, we can just build that. We’re very excited about the possibilities this is going to give us.[/p][h3]"[/h3][p]
Thank you Ulrik for the more in-depth explanation of how all this works, and super cool to hear some of the more nitty-gritty under the hood of how all this works.

Work in progress of the pathfinding and avoidance in the new navigation system

In-editor screenshot of how the raycasts spread from a unit to check whether or not it has line of sight with objects and units in the level

Raycasts used to check if a unit has direct line of sight

While there is still some ironing to be done to work out some of the quirks in the system, as seen in the gifs above we can now reliably ask large groups of units to move somewhere and more or less expect them to go where we ask them to. Sometimes a couple of them stray and find their own path, but we made sure they get reprimanded by the Lord and fall back in line soon (e.g. after a little more tweaking of some code).

We are all very excited about this. For such a core system of Dinolords to be working buttery smooth and being a lot nicer to interact with when designing levels, is making future work a lot more efficient.

[/p][h2]TAGS - Tomorrow's Awesome Games Showcase at Copenhagen Gaming Week[/h2][p]If you happen to find yourself in Copenhagen on the 13th-15th of February, come say hi!
We will be showcasing a demo of Dinolords as part of the TAGS section of the exhibit.
There's also a bunch of other cool stuff to check out at the event, check the program and get tickets over at https://www.copenhagengamingweek.dk.
Hope to see some of you there.

[/p][h3]Until Next Time[/h3][p]That was all for this edition of Dinolords Monthly.
As always, you can find us on Twitter and Youtube, or have a more informal chat with us over on Discord.

Catch you in the next one![/p][p]-panxter[/p]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Eighty Thousand Wishlists![/h2]
Great news, everyone! Dinolords have just reached 80.000 wishlists!

We keep being humbled by the continued interest and support our project is met with by all of you, and a Triceratops-sized thank you from all of us to all of you for engaging with us across all possible platforms!

Eighty thousand people, there are so many of you! That's almost the entire population of Isle of Man! Just imagining that many people interested in what we do and sharing our passion for cool games is completely overwhelming!

So thank you, from all of us, sincerely.

It means the world to us!

[p]"It's....
be-....
-ginning to look a lot like Christmas!"

And as yet another page on the calendar flips over and we prepare ourselves for the seasonal stress and winter depression, the light of a single candle flame brightens up the mood - we can rejoice, for it is time for another edition of Dinolords Monthly, where we check in on some of the things we have been working on for the last month-or-so!

This month, we will have a look at some of the things that have been happening over on our Discord (shameless plug in case you want to have a more in-depth look and have a chat with all of us, head on over!),

[/p][h2]Oh lawd he comin...![/h2][p]Over the past year, our main character has seen quite a few iterations. For this segment, I will hand over the word to our 3D model master, Jesper, who will go over the history of the Lord model:

When I came aboard the project, the Lord looked like this:


It was a pretty cool look, but at the time, it was clear that he was built for the original look of the game - and that look was now changing. The art was becoming more detailed and with it, a more realistic art style was also decided for the characters.


"I feel like I could get lost in your eyes. Like Zod got lost in the phantom zone"
At first, with several characters, I tried to lift them visually by updating the textures to something more detailed.

This helped with matching the updating environment, but having buttons for eyes ended up just not fitting with the direction the visuals were going in, and also lead to the characters having terrible night vision - so at this time, I started swapping out the heads of the characters. We didn't have time to rebuild the full bodies but at the same time, we also wanted to make sure that we showed the general idea of where we were going so this is the compromise we landed on.


I guess we were trying to get ahead.......
I'll see myself out. Well maybe not because I still have things to post.

With the trailer fast approaching, something was missing. A cape. Obviously. And armour I guess. But mostly a cape. That said, the lords outfit didn't work for a cape, so a new body was built.


Not all heroes wear capes - but all Lords do !

The Lords new body was built under considerable time constraints but he made it. A few things were fixed afterwards, like the colouring of the cape - but his detailing was always a bit bare bones, and I had plans to go back in and add more later.

But there were other, more important things to do. Rebuilding the other characters, adding new characters, getting new people into the art pipeline, making dinosaurs for the dinosaur game is also something felt important... and... so on.

Over time, the Lord that was made for the first trailer looked outdated. Thing I wanted to fix became more and more.


"Hello darkness my old friend. Why is my hair see-through from the inside again" - And the answer to that is - Game Magic!

This summer, it was suggested that we should have a new - updated - Lord. At this time, there were many things I could do better by starting over.

I got to work, with a plan of having two different body types to choose from. This would mean two versions of every armour set, but also expanded abilities to roleplay in the game.

Due to deadlines, I ended up focusing on the first body type for the initial deadline and then went back to finish the second body type afterwards. We all wanted to make sure we got as good of a lord as we could for it.
At this time, I called in help too. Lina drew up amazing patterns that I could plaster on the armour, and Philip drew a texture for the face of the initial body type. The previous lord literally just had a single colour facial texture, so there were a lot of improvements to gain here.

For the cape I worked with a new physics solution that was... a lot better.


Gain - Cool Cape. Also gain - Giant bald pattern from dodge-rolling so damn much. Realism TM or something. OK so that latter part was actually fixed. That said, you can go bald if you want to and I'll get to that in a moment.

I went back and created the rest of the second body type, and a second outfit for each character. At the same time Ulrik was also brewing on a character creator that we will show off another time when it's further along. This is where you can choose to be bald btw!
We are a small team, but we also believe in giving options where possible. What we have now is a base and I hope we can expand a lot further with that base so that people wont feel constrained when building their new Lord. Here are the two Lord body types with the same armour.


That was a relatively small dive into the many revisions of The Lord. I could go much deeper but then we would be here all day. Hope you got something positive out of it !

Thank you Jesper for the rundown, but absolutely also for the visual upgrade - what a make-over!

[/p][h2]Concept art[/h2][p]

Lina has made this super cool drawing of the Stegosaurus unit, complete with longboat-siding, shields and archers.

Over on Twitter, you can check out a neat timelapse showing the work from sketchlines to fully coloured!


[/p][h2]Buildings[/h2][p]
Brick by brick, we are chipping away at the specifics of base-building!


During November, and most of December as well, big things are happening to the base-building elements of the game. I guess one could say that we are doing foundational work for how you progress through building, upgrading and managing your base.

Designing things like that is impossible to do in a vacuum, as it interweaves tightly with unit production, level design, session pacing and loads of other factors - all of which also can't be designed in an isolated setting.

This results in something that might feel a little scattered, but is the product of incremental work on multiple systems in parallel.

The details of base building are still setting, so we are not quite ready to reveal it all yet, but expect news on this soon.

[/p][h2]Until next time[/h2][p]That's all, folks!

Next time it is the December edition, and due to holidays and me taking a couple days off, that edition will be pushed slightly into January.

Until then, we all hope you all have a great time with your families, friends, loved ones, pets, dustbunnies, or dinosaurs.[/p][p]-panxter[/p]