Monomyth News

Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!

It's time for another update! This month I am in the middle of creating Beta Patch 4. While doing so I decided to release a small interim patch to fix some of the issues of Beta 3 and introduce the new trading system. As always you can find the video devlog and its transcript below:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

See you soon and best wishes,

Michael


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Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!

It is time for another update on Monomyth! As you know last month Beta 3 started. Since then I have been working on Beta 4 and implemented numerous improvements as well as a new trading system. These newly implemented features will be added shortly in a small interim patch. So let’s go through all these things in detail.

First, let’s take a look at a few more general things that I have fixed throughout the last few weeks. I finally found the time to reimplement weapon load-outs on the new codebase, as they were present in the original Kickstarter demo. Now your character can wear two different sets of weapons and quickly switch between the two in a combat situation. Alternatively, you can also use this to quickly stow away torches, so you are not seen by enemies.

In terms of level design, I added shortcuts between different areas as well as fast traveling from designated points in the game. You have seen these fast travel points before, except now that all areas are in the game they are active and usable. Together with the shortcuts, these changes make the world feel significantly more interconnected and backtracking becomes less of a problem.

Of course, I have also worked on the game’s main hub. This will be the main area of Beta Update 4. Players will find most traders in this hub as well as an anchor point for the game’s main quest. Concerning quests I have added another small fix: Instead of having quest items clutter up the player’s inventory, the latest version of the game now features a dedicated quest inventory. This was another small feature I finally had time to transfer from the old codebase. However, in this version of the game, any item type can be a quest item. In the original demo, this flag was technically limited to regular combinatory items, meaning no consumables, weapons, or anything with specific functionality. The quest inventory itself works much like an item bar you would see in a point-and-click adventure game. It isn’t limited in size and you can just pull items from it to combine them within the game world. This works very well together with the menu-world interactions I implemented a couple of months ago.

But now let’s come to this month’s main feature. As I mentioned during the last update the latest version of Monomyth will feature an entirely new trading system. The system from the demo has been completely replaced by a barter trading system that is similar to that of Ultima Underworld.



The system itself is relatively simple. Go up to an NPC and open the trading menu. The menu consists of four windows two of which are your and the NPC’s inventory. In the middle, you will find the offer windows. Just pull the items you wish to buy from an NPC into their offer window and do the same with items you wish to get rid of on the player’s side. Do this until the total values of the two offers match. You can also make a monetary offer to balance out value differences.

Characters with the “Speech” skill can try to haggle. Simply make a slightly undervalued offer and click consider. The little output window on the left will tell you whether or not this is a feasible deal and if your character has a chance to make it work. There is a little bit of luck involved in this as well since concluding such a trade will automatically do a skill check. If your character fails this check the trading attempt will fail as well. If you do this too often, the NPC will temporarily refuse to trade with you.

Along with this system, I also made a few changes to basic inventory management. A small feature that was long overdue was proper stack management. Up until now, it was never really necessary to handle specific amounts of items, however, with the trading system this was finally implemented. I think, for the moment, this should cover all the typical features you’d expect from a drag-and-drop inventory system.

As I mentioned in the beginning I added all these features in a small interim patch which will release shortly. After that, I will continue with Beta 4’s content, which will mostly cover the game’s main quest. Once that is done, I will need to polish a few things and the game will finally be ready for the Open Backer Beta.

I am not entirely sure about the mode of that beta yet. I could imagine repeating all area focus tests from the closed beta, except with a significantly shorter iteration time. This would mean you would get to test the game step by step, area by area, with a new area opening, for example, every two weeks. This could have the advantage that tests would be more thorough. People could take their time and really explore the details of each area. Alternatively, I could also just open the latest closed beta with all areas available. I am not yet sure how I will go about this but I guess we will see throughout the coming weeks.

Either way, stay tuned for more updates, and see you soon!

Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!

It's time for another project update! In this one, we will be talking about the latest beta patch and how development will continue after that.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Sorry for the delay this month. I wanted to make sure that the patch was largely finalized before creating the update. As always you will find the video transcript attached to this post!

Best wishes,
Michael

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Time just flies! We are already in April but the development of Monomyth continues. The time to really wrap it up is drawing near, but there is still some stuff to do. So in this update, we will be talking about a massive amount of content that will be added to the game shortly and how we will continue from that. At this point, I don’t want to spoil too much, but I want to keep you updated on the latest work that has gone into the project. So let’s take a look at that.

I have been working on Beta 3 roughly for the last two months and it’s now close to completion. Right away I can say I am glad that for a change I have listened to my own advice and I learned from the mistakes made during the development of Beta 2.

Beta 3’s development was much better planned, much better scaled and unsurprisingly much better executed. I built most of it based on a blockout I did earlier in development, even before the refactoring. As a result, I didn’t go overboard in terms of scaling, and the geometry plus detail passes were done much faster.

This gave me a lot more time to make some unique assets that would add personality to the area. It also gave me time to implement more intricate and polished designs. This is reflected very well in the general engagement with the game environment. Or in other words, Beta 3 features more detailed level mechanics. This goes from secrets, to traps, to what I tend to call environmental sidequests or challenges.

I also had more time working on enemies and enemy encounters. So Beta 3 actually features multiple new enemy types, some taken over from older work I did, some made completely from scratch. None of these have been in the game so far.



There were some new enemy types in Beta 2 as well, but I couldn’t put as much work into them as I wanted so I pushed some of that into the polishing phase. Luckily some of the work I did for Beta 3 overlapped with that work and now all it requires are some finishing touches. That much just as a side note. All in all the new enemies should give you a nice, fresh challenge.

In this context, I should also mention I slightly adjusted my workflow for character creation. Now if you have been following these updates for a while, you know I have been rambling about the troubles of custom character creation for UE4 in the past. Without any tool support, it can be quite challenging to bind a custom character mesh to the standard UE4 skeleton. In the past, I have done this with a mix of vertex data transfers and weight painting. This method was rather restrictive when it came to humanoid characters that weren’t perfectly proportional. I have now replaced parts of my original workflow with a tool called AutoRig Pro and that makes things a lot easier.

Now what’s left for Beta Update 3 are a couple of narrative assets, meaning some dialogue and documents, as well as item distribution throughout the new area. After that, the patch will be uploaded to the beta branch and the beta-level backers will be able to test it. This should be done within the next week or so.

That’s another step on the roadmap I showed you during the last update - so what’s next?



In Beta Update 4, I will mostly focus on the game’s main social hub. I have already built a good portion of that level so geometry and detail passes should be done pretty quickly. The main part of the workload will revolve around implementing the main quest as well as a new trading system. There was an old trading system on the original codebase - you can see it by trading with the rat NPC in the demo - but this one will be replaced by a completely new system.

I will also include some new features concerning inventory management, among other things a separate inventory for quest items.

Once that is done the polishing phase will begin. Polish will cover pretty much everything from item balance, to AI. Two major tasks will be improving the Lysandrian Heartlands and the mines. Both areas are perfectly functional in terms of mechanics, but they need a bit of a workover to be on the level of beta 3’s quality. In this process, I will probably split the mine up into two areas. You may remember this area was overscaled. This also came with some technical issues which I seek to resolve.

As I said in the past, at this point of development I will bring in more people. The first step here will be an open backer beta.

After that, I will have to look at how I am going to release the game to the public. There are basically two ways to go about this. Either I will still implement the last portion of the game as well as the backer content and release the game in full later this year, or I will release an Early Access version and implement the final content patch during that phase. Currently, things are scheduled in a way that the latter is more likely, but it also depends on the backer's feedback.

During all of this, I will see whether I can release an updated demo. Maybe I can deploy a separate build once things are properly polished.

All in all, there is still a good bit of work ahead but we are getting closer and closer to a public release. As always I will keep you updated and I will see you next time.

Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!

It's time for another update on Monomyth! Just like last month, I would like to present this update in the form of a short video, which you can find here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

For those of you who would rather read, I will attach the transcript plus relevant screengrabs!

Best wishes,
Michael

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[h2]Video Transcript (Video Devlog 1.0)[/h2]

Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!

A new year has begun and I am still very busy developing the project. I am going through milestone after milestone, slowly pushing toward a game that is ready for you, the backers, and the many followers who have supported Monomyth for over a year now (some of you even longer than that). Thank you again for your patience! I will do my best to get the project into your hands as soon as possible.

But before that, we will have to go through a couple more beta patches first. As this new year begins, a new update for Monomyth’s closed beta is about to be released. Update 2 is being packaged at this very moment. So, I thought, let’s take a look at what’s actually in there, so you can get an understanding of what goes into a patch and why this particular one took so long:

The most time-consuming task for update 2 was the level design. Under the heartlands, you will find the mines and the factory tower.



These areas are relatively expansive and there is a lot of focus on verticality, which made it harder to assess the full scope of the environment. Essentially I started out with the idea of an underground tower adjacent to a series of caves, which later became a mine. My original intention was that the players would make their way down the tower traveling between the tower halls and the mines which are connected by bridges.



You can probably see the inspiration from locations like the mines of Moria or dwarven strongholds from various fantasy settings here.

Of course, the more impressive you want the vertical aspect to be, the higher that tower will turn out to be. But the higher the tower gets, the more caves you need to build to get a well-knit together environment with a well-balanced variety of aesthetics. You don’t just want to be in the tower and you don’t just want to be in the caves. You want to travel through a nicely mixed-up environment to keep things fresh. And from that, you can also see why the scope kinda blew up. Building the environment, especially the caves took much longer than I anticipated.
This is especially ironic because originally I restarted the development of update 2’s area due to the original concepts being out of scope.





Here you have a 60x60 tile map of the original design. Every tile corresponds to a portion of the floor that is 400x400 unreal units in the engine. The original design was also supposed to include a certain verticality aspect so it basically had two levels layered on top of each other, including one connecting intermediate section. This level was almost entirely blocked out (with the exception of the ceilings), and it was clear that it was probably out of scope. The area design should have probably been cut in half and for verticality, the four remaining sections should have been layered on top of each other.

Instead, I restarted the area at the design stage, which is probably okay (you don’t want to tinker too much with broken old designs), but I made one big mistake: Instead of creating another map like for the original design, I winged the details on the environment. Of course, I had things down on paper, I had the core ideas and some rooms mapped out, but I also left a lot of blank spaces in that design. So basically I had some rooms planned out but only in specific sections, and the rest of the map kind of grew from what was built.

That last part specifically proved to be a big mistake. Don’t “grow” your maps, because that will almost certainly cause trouble in terms of scope. It’s very likely that you will overscale the area that you planned out in detail and then the rest of the environment suffers from it. You will probably wish to bring the same level of detail to those parts of the map, but it’s simply out of scope and you will never finish your work.

I noticed this happening as I went along because the workload went out of balance, meaning, that there were portions of the map that were basically done in terms of regular geometry, but which would have been way too much work during detail passes and beyond - the parts of level creation where you basically go through every room again and add detail meshes, and then NPC and mechanics and lighting and whatnot. So I suspected this happening at first and when I was sure I had to rescale, which means, bluntly said, cutting parts of the level. That’s always unpleasant because you already worked on it and you spent time on it but you have to do it or the project milestone will fail. It’s basically a sunk-cost issue.

The good part of this is, you can still keep what you made for either another level or even another project. There is plenty of examples of this in released games, even in the Triple-A titles.
Either way, the remaining parts of cut-down levels are very often better for it. I firmly believe that’s the case with Monomyth’s update 2 area because I am quite satisfied with the end result. It has some very good verticality, a lot of complexity in terms of layout, interesting little mechanics, and secrets. So I feel it came out pretty alright even if it took way too long to finish.

The main lesson here is probably: Don’t grow an environment. Don’t improvise room designs. Properly plan section details ahead of time, at least to a point where you have a rough outline of how to progress through a section and you can estimate the full scale of an area and not just a part of it. Otherwise, the workload for different parts of the level will likely get out of balance and you will have to cut stuff and rescale, which will cost you a lot of time. And we don’t want that, especially when time and resources are sparse. That’s probably a fine way to summarize the issues with update 2’s level design.

Luckily I won’t have to deal with these problems in update 3, because there the level is already blocked out and scaled properly. Update 3 is also generally further along, which makes me confident that it should be done significantly faster.











But let’s move on. What else is in update 2?

I have worked on a whole bunch of new items, particularly weapons. I mention these specifically because I work on weapon models in batches, meaning the final items are not only meant for update 2, respectively the area from that update, but also for later parts of the game. So this is also a bit of preponed work that will save time in following patches. Something similar is true for spells. Most of these have been ported to the new codebase and are mechanically functional, they just need a visual workover.



The new area also features some new NPCs. Of course, that also means new dialogue. The dialogue in Monomyth is organized in dialogue trees or more accurately in multiple dialogue graphs per dialogue partner. The graph structure has to be planned out ahead of time - I do that in a simple spreadsheet. That spreadsheet then has to be transferred into the game’s data tables from where dialogue data is read. As a result writing dialogue was quite a pain in previous updates. Not only did I have to take great care in planning the graph structure coherently, but I also had to spend significant time transferring the finished graph into the respective data table. I did this manually, which is of course always a potential source for error and therefore bugs. So in update 2, I decided I want to have no more of this and I implemented some tool support. I can now do an automatic transcription of planned-out dialogue graphs into Unreal’s data table format.


(Old Dialogue Workflow)


(New Dialogue Workflow)

I use a simple python script for that, which transcribes a CSV into JSON format. The JSON file can then be appended to UE4’s exported data tables, which are then just reimported into the engine’s editor with the new data. This already saved me a ton of time and I am very glad I implemented this relatively small tool. It isn’t full tool support for writing dialogue but it automates the most time-consuming part of it.

So that’s it for update 2. As I said it is currently building. I will be going through it a few more times, applying some last fixes here and there and it will be in the beta branch very soon. And then it is on to update 3, which, as I said, will hopefully be done a lot faster this time. During the next Kickstarter update I will probably still be busy with it, but hopefully wrapping it up soon at that point. I believe that Kickstarter update will also be a good opportunity to go into detail on the remaining tasks and to outline another little roadmap to release, or at the very least, the open backer beta. As I mentioned in previous updates, the open backer beta will be released sometime between updates 4 and 5, depending on how much polishing I still need to do beforehand. Either way, stay tuned for more updates, and see you soon!

Best Wishes,
Michael

Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!

I thought this month we could do something a little different, so instead of giving you the usual written update, I created a few video devlogs going into detail on various subjects of the project's development. In particular, the videos focus on the following topics:

• Current Progress
  
• Sentries
  
• Telekinesis
  
• Fire Propagation
  
• Rune Traps
  

You can watch them right here or head over to the RatTower Youtube channel, which I plan to use more regularly in the future:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I will probably adapt the format a bit for coming updates. So instead of releasing several videos at once, I might upload material more frequently. Either way, I hope you will enjoy these videos and I will keep you posted!

Best wishes,
Michael

Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!

another month, another update! I am still very busy with beta update 2, which I hope to finish and release very soon. So let's quickly take a look at what has happened over the last couple of weeks!


[h3]Current Progress[/h3]

The area in which most of update 2 takes place is far below the Lysandrian Heartlands. I originally had a different level layout in mind but I decided to rework it into something more manageable (and also more interesting). Now, after about two months of work, the level is about 90% there. It still misses some details and narrative assets, but the lion's share of the work is done.



Update 2 will feature one of the biggest areas in the game. I believe this is a good opportunity to introduce you to Monomyth's fast travel system. Of course, this system can't just be activated through a map menu. Instead, it is a part of the world itself. Players will have to figure out the mechanics of ancient teleporter rooms that can be found all over Lysandria.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Talking of mechanics, update 2 will also introduce a few quest-specific mechanics that are related to the new area. There will be some mining and smelting, and while there is no real crafting system in the game, players will be able to toy with some of the interactive machines that can be found in the area.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I also took a little break from level design and worked on the game's inventory. Not only does Monomyth now feature visually more appealing menus, but the menu interactions have been streamlined to a point where most player/environment interactions can be done from the inventory. Players can now pick up, throw and combine items directly from within the inventory screen. I also integrated the object placement system that I implemented a few weeks ago. This way players will have a much easier time placing fish or pie next to a cooking spot (a recurring problem in the demo).

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As a result, the inventory interactions are now a lot more intuitive (and coincidentally, also a lot closer to what Arx Fatalis did).


[h3]Gamespot Article[/h3]

As you probably all know, Monomyth was partly inspired by the King's Field series. Because of that, the project was featured in a Gamespot article on upcoming King's Field-like RPGs. So if you haven't checked that out yet, you can find the article here:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/move-over-dark-souls-the-from-software-title-inspiring-a-new-wave-of-games-is-kings-field/1100-6507649/

And now it's time for me to go back to the mines and finish that beta update 2! Then it's on to updates 3 and 4, which I hope will be finished much faster since most of their level design is already done. Update 4 will also be the last content update before I start polishing everything for the open backer beta. As you can probably already guess, this also means that the release will slip slightly into 2023. Lots of progress has been made but there is still quite a bit of work left to do. I will give you a more detailed overview of the road to release in one of the next updates. Until then!


Best wishes,
Michael