Zofia News

I am aiming to have a demo of Zofia out sometime this week. Currently, Zofia as a project is on hold, but it isn't fair to the others or myself to just never release anything from it.

That being said, while I have made some adjustments based on feedback from the internal beta, some features or options are going to be limited as they've proven to be problematic.

The demo is 64-bit Windows only, and will only feature single player/local co-op - It will feature just the prologue and will not have the character editor at this time.

I will still be collecting feedback and will try to fix issues as they come up.

Thank you everyone, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Due to unfortunate timing and personal reasons, Zofia has temporarily been placed on hold.

The art upgrade to the 'new style' has been much more time consuming and costly. The artists have left the project, which has made finishing the project while maintaining the art standard difficult. The scope of the project is big enough that the art will likely not be able to continue in this style - Though I am unsure of what the changes, if any, will be.

The other primary reason is personal - I don't feel the game plays as its supposed to. We made some significant changes to accommodate the art style and try out suggested ideas from feedback, some of these changes have led to more design problems and gameplay impact than we could have realized.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, hopefully the next update will be more positive.

This dev talk is going to go over some nitty gritty details about game development and some of the issues we've ran into during 2020. This will be greatly summarized.



It's an absolute surprise to no one that better art takes more time. What we didn't realize when we first started making the art transition is that it bleeds into absolutely everything.

The 'old' art style

I'm not an artist so choosing the project's art style wasn't really a choice, it was what I had a skillset in. The distinctive advantage to the old art style though was speed. I'll give you some metrics though: At its height I could whip up a new armor set in about 1-3 days. New assets like boxes or tables could be anywhere from 3 minutes to 3 hours each.

At the time, I didn't really consider how much of an advantage this was. As I am also doing the implementation for enemies, I could go from a concept -> model -> animating -> implemented in 4-7 days. A fresh new enemy a week is not bad all things considering.

The 'new' art style

The new art style was a choice, though one with some unforeseen consequences.

Zofia's design called for six unique areas - The goal being that most had some environmental obstacle that the player(s) would have to overcome. The easiest example being a cold, snowy mountain fort that you would ideally want to wear a cozy jacket in.

From a design perspective, this is a lot harder because now you have six areas you have to consider and design. What works in the snowy mountain fort probably won't fit in that tropical sea-side town.

This gets doubled-down when you realize each NPC and enemy also (likely) needs to be thematically correct, so everything requires a lot more legwork. Overall this made the process of creating a new enemy from about a week to about 3-5 weeks.

In the original scope of the game, estimating for every asset, and given our team size, this likely set the game back about ~2-2.5 years of development time.

In retrospect - Art styles are actually quite a lot of work, and creating and refining one is some serious effort. I don't believe anyone on the team quite anticipated how much the impact of the art change would be.

Looking to the future - I don't actually have a confident answer on this one. We're trying to find a better way to speed up the art process without compromising the game's design, but there may not be a good answer, at least none that we've found yet.



In hindsight, this seems a little obvious, but there is a distinctive lack of first-person melee games out there, and splitscreen as a feature is typically uncommon.

I have a remarkable amount of design decisions being made entirely because of first-person and splitscreen. A big one is text. I mean any work on the UI takes a bit of wizardry to make, but getting the scale to something legible in splitscreen is a challenge on its own.

Definitely not showing in-game books

The issues we've seen with first person melee combat is largely a lack of situational awareness. It's a player skill to manage handling multiple close-range enemies at a time, but this is amplified with the very basic premise that blocking or parrying requires you to look (generally) at your target, and therefore unable to assess the situation.

This becomes worse on splitscreen where your screen space and field of view is limited.

The other issue of course is that it can be difficult to determine how far away something is, which can result in sword strikes narrowly missing and causing a lot of frustration.

In retrospect - As they say, these are challenges that come with the territory, though admittedly I didn't grasp that very well until later on.

Looking to the future - These are solvable issues but they can be challenging issues, but I don't believe our melee combat has quite hit its stride.



These are smaller topics that don't quite have enough to talk about to warrant a bigger space.

• There just isn't a good place to put the drivable airship in at right now as it causes a lot of gameplay issues, but I'd eventually like to find a good place for it, if possible.
  
  
  
  
• It's really difficult to get swimming right and bug free. I think if I had to do this over again, I would probably not include swimming at all, or greatly reduce its complexity.
  
• There was a bug where wearing a set of cursed armor would make your health bar invisible, and honestly that's such a better curse than what the armor was actually supposed to do.
  
• I should probably do monthly articles like this rather than being silent for months at a time.
  

That's it, I'm hoping by my next update we'll have some good answers to things.

Admittedly, nearly this entire year hasn't really gone to plan. We've made some stumbles, changed some core design, and ran into several things we weren't really expecting.

I'm going to talk a bit about some of the problems we've run into and the decisions we've made. Its a little bit of reflection as well as lessons learned.

Also some of these screenshots will include old/temp art and definitely not final.

[h2]Core Changes[/h2]

We were originally aiming for an Early Access release much earlier in the year, as well as a split screen only demo. Several things changed this, the art change being a big one, but this resulted in several changes being made across the entire design.

Most of these changes are good, but as we quickly learned, once you change one mechanic, you're going to end up tweaking/changing the rest.

[h2]Magic[/h2]

Magic was originally a little odd: You consumed an item (like a potion) and would gain temporary magic abilities. Some were powerful, others were fairly mild and nearly passive.

While this worked, it made you reliant on items and was too temporary to make a long term difference. You could also only really have one magic 'active' at a time, which felt weak considering you're supposed to be part-mage.

The new system is much simpler: Aim at an object, and press the magic key. You draw the element of whatever you're looking at and can now hurl it at foes. (Or other players)

Even better, if you hold the magic key down, you'll manipulate that material in some way:


Cover all wood objects in spikey wooden branches? Sure, then maybe kick someone into them.

Launch another player into a lake? Absolutely.

[h2]Balancing[/h2]

Which leads us to the next problem: Balancing.

The game was originally balanced from what we saw at the Expo last year. With the magic changes and more flexibility designed with the grapple hook, most enemies are now pretty much pushovers in difficulty, even more so in co-op. Unfortunately this is the impact of making significant core changes but its something we can overcome.

Right now we'll probably leave the enemies as is and keep them in the early game, but make some more advanced enemies for have some better mobility to combat the player.

[h2]Levels[/h2]



This has influenced many of the levels we have built out, unfortunately causing many to be reworked entirely.

The combination of magic and the grapplehook caused a lot of sections to be easily bypassed. Combined with now much more powerful players, and you could beat levels quick.

We also felt a lot of levels didn't utilize gameplay strengths, or focused on an unusual aspect of the game that didn't quite work out well as an entire level. (Looking at you, desert ghosts)



On the plus side, a lot of the online play is mostly working, aside from a few obvious issues. I don't want to call it out too soon but I'm hoping we can have something out there sooner than later. Well we'll see.

Anyways that's all the notes for now. Until then, here is a picture of Morrison and his (to be filled) item shop:

A few weeks ago we sent out about a dozen private beta keys to start gathering some feedback for the project. This seemed like a good time to get thoughts on the current direction and the best steps to move forward.

I feel its also relevant to note that this is the first (?) private beta we've ran, so I feel we stumbled on a few steps, but all in all it worked. The beta included roughly 20% of the game, but had enough of the core mechanics to have a strong idea for how the remainder of the game worked.

We've done a lot of review of the feedback and it's given us quite a bit to think about.

In no particular order, here are some various observations from our notes:

Originally we had a lot of manually piloting the airship around. While a neat novelty, it became kind of a chore, and left other players in co-op with not much to do.

We're considering making the airship more of a 'safe house' that you can access whenever you need it in certain levels, and potentially be able to pilot it around in areas (where it would make sense).

Keeping the deck cluttered with stuff is cool right...?

Every single beta tester we got feedback from struggled with the combat difficulty.

We've concluded there are several reasons for this that were external to the actual AI: UI Feedback, level design, the player's animations, and the lack of a proper combat tutorial.

That being said, I'm looking at making weaker variants of the current enemy types to create a better learning curve. Fortunately this private beta didn't have any of the bosses, which may have been way more problematic.

Simple ghost who lobs magic, or the harbinger of death?

On the up side, a lot of players found they liked the grapple hook. Some so much so that they effectively stopped walking altogether.

There are a handful of tools you can equip to your left arm, but at the minute none of them really quite measure up with the grapple hook. I predict this might lead to some problems down the road so I think its a good time to reevaluate the other tools.

Not shown: Swinging into this tree.

There is a lot of thoughts on the UI - which I think at this point needs an overhaul as well as some notable changes. I don't think I am going to discuss that at the minute as that may need to be its own topic.

Lastly, we've still been overhauling the art style. This is definitely incomplete but I think the vibe is probably going to stay the same:





Thanks for reading.