Arcadian Atlas News

Welcome back adventurers! We've got some awesome news this go-round for not just backers, but creators, so keep your eyes peeled.

But before we jump in, if you've ever wanted to see the artistry behind Arcadian Atlas live, soon you can! Becca and I have worked to get a Twitch stream set up where you can watch her live-stream art creation, from maptiles, character design, animation work, and more!




Give her a follow and keep your eyes peeled for her first live stream announcement. For more info & polls on things like preferred stream times, check out her twitter page here.

Introducing: The BITE Engine

Way back when we jumped from RPG Maker to the more expansive world of Unity, we had a vision for not just our dream game, but for a creation tool so user-friendly it could be given to anyone who wanted to make a tactical RPG (one of the most notoriously difficult genres to create).



That dream is beginning to become a reality concurrently with the creation of Arcadian Atlas. Patrick has been hard-at-work on the foundation for what we are dubbing the BITE engine enhancement - an add-on that utilizes Odin Inspector's tools to create easily-modifiable units, scenarios, skills, items, weapons, and scenes. The best part: this tool is being developed in conjunction with Atlas, meaning every benefit to the system is a benefit to the game, which includes the following:

More Power to the Game Designer - A large portion of a game designer's life is turning knobs and whistles to balance values and to create the best possible experience for the player. You've all probably played RPGs with horrid difficulty spikes, or gotten bored going hours without a challenge. BITE allows us to easily and quickly implement your feedback when it comes beta time!



BITE Engine's Weapon Editor

Smaller File and Patch Sizes - To get Arcadian Atlas' prototype off the ground, we initially utilized Unity Prefabs. Moving to a new different segmented form of data means we can be much more efficient with the size of the game, as well as any patches we make on Steam (and elsewhere). We know some of you backers have internet data caps, so we want to keep file sizes as user-friendly as possible!

Advanced Cutscenes and Scenarios - We've forged a giant pyramid of stats, classes, status effects, and skills out of the prototype's design work so far. Cutscenes and scenarios (missions) rely on pretty much everything, so being clean and organized with those building blocks allows us to quickly create, reorder, and modify events.


BITE Engine's Core Editor

Plug & Play Capabilities - We've re-structured the logic and data to separate it from the graphics, which is a fancy way of saying Arcadian Atlas and future tactical RPGs using BITE will require far less digging into code-bases to create and play!

Effortless Changes - With BITE's data-driven design, we can remove, add, and change everything from units, status effects, skills, missions, locations, cutscenes (or most anything else) effortlessly midway through development based on new needs and feedback!


BITE Engine's Unit Editor

Iconic

To celebrate BITE, we wanted to show off some of the graphics we're paring with Patrick's data-driven systems.


Menu and Stat Icons

Iconography is an integral part of the user experience, and serves both as localization tool (because images require no translation) and ease of navigation. We love the design challenge of creating icons for our stats, items, text boxes, and menus that are at the same time simple, clean, and communicate efficiently. See below just a handful of those we've cooked up for our items:


Item Icons

Interior Designs & Graphics Galore

And of course behind the scenes we've been hard at work on all the graphics, from animations, items, and some drool-worthy interiors. You'll show yourself outside? Why not show yourself INSIDE you reckless warriors!

This go round Becca has been working up some graphics for house interiors and our Recruitment Centers throughout Arcadia. You can see a few of these below.


Recruiter Maptiles

And if we zoom in a bit you can see some light pouring through new windows, and bench for troops to sit and wait (because isn't a Recruitment Center just a glorified waiting room) , and a fancy desk for processing new troops.


Interior Details

Of course, when you're not waiting, you're training with some quality practice dummies and an assortment of weaponry for our discerning warriors:


Interior Details Cont'd

And when you're ready to lay your sweet head to rest, we've got a deluxe bed you could probably cram a couple of people in (uncomfortably, but this isn't a charity!) and some barrels full of wine to help the long hours seem short.



Oh, and not zoomed in on is that lil' cactus. Because we might be thrifty interior designers, but we're not animals. Get some greenery in there!


Crossbow Animations

We're also putting finishing touches on our primary attack animations, ensuring all eight frames front and back are as smooth as possible. From the heavy crossbow toting Ranger above, to the gargantuan hammer our Apothecary is dragging around below, we're nearly done with all our CORE classes and their various fightin' styles!


Hammer Animations

And of course a whole slew of new items for our re-vamped BITE enabled item editors!

Next Time

We're excited to show off some of the interior maps we're working up with these shiny new graphics, the expanded Skill sections of BITE, and lots more art next time! Be sure to check out Becca's Twitch streams and our twitter pages for up-to-the-moment previews and sneak-peaks!

Until then, keep your controllers warm and your bodies cool as we end out this record-setting summer heat!

~Taylor

Arcadian Atlas is officially on Twitch! Follow along for behind-the-scenes footage and art streams~

Welcome all you wonderful folks to another action-packed episode of Arcadian Atlas! This time around we've got tons of details from all across the game development spectrum. Whether it be animation, portraits, map-tunage, music, or behind-the-scenes on programming - you're in the right place!

So dive on in. The waters are warm and cozy!




Artistically, animation is the most pain-staking process of game development. It's a multilayered art, both literally and figuratively, and we wanted to give you a peak behind that process in more depth as we finalize the animations for our core classes.



Each core class has a list of essential battle animations, arranged in a sheet, that are consistent across classes. What's not consistent across classes? Attacks & Skills.



So when making new animations, we start with real-world examples and build keyframes from them. In the case of the above Apothecary Bottle Throw animation, I used myself as a base and built from it.



New animations typically work in stages:

Raw Footage - a video or gif of real-world people performing the action to be animated.
Skeleton - the basic shapes of an animation, typically very rough. This is used to ensure the flow of the animation looks correct before detail is added.
Naked Base - the naked form all classes can use before hair, clothes, and other details are added.
Clothed - usually the final stage where all class-specific content is added to the naked base and added to that core classes' sprite sheet.



So in essence, any new animation we create is actually 3 animations, and from start to finish with the Apothecary Bottle Throw it looks like the example below:



And that's just the specialized animations! We've got a whole slew of basic movements and actions to tackle.



Ah, the essentials of a fight. We've got our Idling, Walking, Injured, Charging, Jumping, Flying, Landing, Death animations, and the list goes on! And remember, that's for front views, back views, male, and female troops. 48+ unique frames per class, 2 genders, 4 classes - that's 384+ unique frames just for basic animations!



Over the last few months we've been steadily chipping away at them, and we're happy to say we've not only finalized the designs for our male/female Apothecary and male/female Warmancer - but we've even knocked out all of their core animations! Yep, all 384+ of them!



And now we move on to the specialized attacks for each class, one of which Becca's been hard at work on below:





Let's face it (see what I did there?): little Apothecary and Warmancer sprites are super cute, but sometimes we need to look a person square in the high-detailed eye and give them a good talkin' to.



So Becca and I have been hard at work on portraits to go with our sprites. Because there's nothing sadder than walking into a tavern and the tavern-master won't even look you in the face. That's enough reason to brawl right then and there!





And as pretty as these lil' dudes are walking, slapping, and smashing about - a video game has to be as efficient as possible. Patrick recently upgraded our Unity build with Odin Inspector, a powerful tool that's allowed him to streamline how maps, cutscenes, and menus save data and juggle database information.

We've gone from complicated and rather ugly excel files for items to completely in-engine databases with images and separate, easy-to-read and alter fields like this:



But it's not just for databases! Odin has far-reaching implications for space saving, with the potential to reduce both disk and RAM space requirements by upwards of 90%! That's huge for download size and run speed! In fact, we're already applying it to how maps are constructed and saved:



So while we absolutely adore the animations and art side of Arcadian Atlas, this is easily what is making us most happy!

Oh, but we forgot that we're even improving how animations are handled in the background ; ). Blend Trees will allow us to better organize all of our isometric animations within Unity so that we can finish hooking it up to our unique characters and classes faster! Possibly 75% faster! NUMBERS! BIG NUMBERS EVERYWHERE!





But wait, there's more! We wanted to serenade you out with the latest tune Moritz is working up for our tavern patrons. Because if there's one thing you want while getting a bit tipsy (or enjoying a nice virgin piña colada perhaps?) it's some jazzy tunes:

Tavern Theme Song

Oh, and why not grab a contract to smash some more things while you're at it?






That's it for now, but keep your eyes peeled on our twitter page for glimpses of what's coming up in the Arcadian Atlas pipeline as we get closer to beta!

Arcadian Atlas Twitter

And we'll see all you crazy kids next time with juicy details of skills, fighting' poses, menus, and all the clockwork that makes this beauty tick!