Feature and QA update!
12 months ago – Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 12:54:49 PM

Enhancing our environments

As shared in previous updates, an important aspect of how we approach game development is making sure we don’t go too far, too early, with regards to polishing UI, UX and assets. We just want to get things to a workable state so the team can better understand the game before putting time and resources into polish. This is because we will discover so many little things about your processes and the player experience during development that will change how we see the game and even how we make the game. The less polish we put in before making these discoveries the easier it is to improve things. Here’s an example of our “Grasslands Paths” environment before and after our polish phase. Let us know what you think! 

(Apparently someone couldn't be bothered to find him clothing for the new screenshot...)

Question of the week!

We know we don’t update weekly, but we want to start highlighting questions from our community and couldn’t think of a better name (all our brain cells are focused on the game!) We receive a lot of questions and love answering them, but sometimes a written explanation is just not enough. Here’s our question of the week.

How big is our Anterra?

It’s not a simple answer although it may seem like it. Sure, we could share the virtual square kms/miles but that wouldn’t do it justice. So instead, we made a little GIF to highlight the scale of our world.

Here’s our world map superimposed on the game's overworld. It’s worth pointing out a few things though. The whole overworld is currently in the game. The zoomed in area shown is one 32x32 pixel space of the overworld, which also happens to be the height of the player character. This means that every square of the overworld is a unique location that can be traversed and explored. Although you never have to leave the zoomed in view, the overworld is an important part of the game and serves multiple purposes; It’s the primary way to fast travel. It allows the player to find areas of interest and quest locations easier. And from a game experience standpoint, it helps maintain the grandeur and epic scale of the world.

Upcoming Fireside

We have scheduled an upcoming Fireside and special announcement for this Friday at 3pm PT. To help those that do have time to listen to our Firesides, we are going to be trying out a new tool, AI transcription! Once the Fireside is complete and uploaded, we share a link here along with an AI generated summary. Hopefully it does a good job.

You can RSVP the event here - Discord/💬-fireside-chat 

Speaking of fires, check out our new fire lighting mechanic. It’s missing a few animations and bits of polish, but you can light things in WoA now!

Some new features!
about 1 year ago – Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 04:49:52 PM

So much of our work goes into things that can’t be easily shown. Stuff like tools and systems that enable a small team like ours to make such an ambitious game. But that’s definitely not the only stuff we work on, we’re making a game after all! That being said, we also don’t want to show everything. Surprise can be a very powerful part of experiencing a new game...

Archery!

Building on our combat and quick-time systems we have now fully integrated our archery and sling mechanics. There are a few things that make archery a unique challenge in WoA. We needed it to function in a streamlined way with our combat systems, while also working outside of combat for things like puzzles, minigames or hunting. Like most things in WoA, this posed quite the design challenge! Archery had to be both quick and snappy and simple to use, while also requiring some timing and skill to execute effectively. Well, we’re happy to share with you what we’ve come up with. There are still a few bits of polish that we plan to add, but we’re very proud of where it’s at. You'd be amazing at all the technical challenges that come with a feature like this; most of which comes from trying to make a 2D world act like a 3D one.

These GIFs show the archery ability at a lower tier, and there are lots of skills and talents that will make archery far more powerful and effective as the player progresses.

Here’s a little target practice.

You can shoot anything in the game like buildings, just be careful not to launch one through a window!

In combat, you don’t have to aim with our auto-targeting system, but you can still buff your attack with a well-timed shot. We also have a cover system, that makes objects in WoA provide varying amounts of cover from ranged attacks.

We have so many other new features in the game, but here’s something that our community has asked about. You can now see what you picked up, or interacted with in our new activity log.

 Activity Log

The activity log also works in combat. And we plan to let players control different aspects of the activity log, like what parts of that game use it or how much information it shows.

Stay tuned for more!

Fireside - Demo Stream and Q&A
about 1 year ago – Sun, Sep 03, 2023 at 12:04:27 PM

Just a quick update to share our latest Fireside recording. You can find a summary with timestamps (written by a community member!) on our Discord and in the YouTube comments. We played the demo live, and talked through some of the features. Unfortunately, the video was cut just before we got into most of the Q&A, but still fun to watch! Feel free to post any questions here, or on our Discord.

Discord - https://discord.gg/world-of-anterra-867775819967102986

A peek behind the curtains
about 1 year ago – Fri, Sep 01, 2023 at 11:08:34 AM

This is a long one, but I think it's worth it! And there's a special announcement at the end.

If you could come to our studio, what would you see? You'd see me standing over Ryan with a whip, yelling, "MORE PIXELS!!"... Sadly, for some, that is not the truth. What you would actually see is a group of experienced and dedicated people working hard every day to bring WoA to life. In fact, if you had been here every day since you backed us, you’d know that we have never lost our focus or had any downtime since our Kickstarter campaign ended… well, other than stopping to write the occasional update. 😛

So, what’s this update about then? It’s a look behind the scenes at some of our processes! Some of this stuff has been brought up during past Firesides on Discord, but I understand that not everyone is interested in joining us there, as much as we encourage you to. Also, this is going to be far more detailed than anything we have shared previously.

If you were to check out our server, you would see posts and comments from the team, you would see us answering questions and probably feel generally more informed about the game. You would also see our whole team working together every day! …sort of, more on this below.

But enough with the preamble.

Communication - the foundation of a great team

If you’ve been on our Discord, you know that we have channels for community discussions, WoA discussions and specific channels for sharing WoA content and updates. Then at the bottom we also have our studio voice channels. There’s one channel for each team member and we use them like “virtual cubicles” where we all stay logged in during our workday. Even with most of us working together in the studio we still use these channels every day. This is so that any remote team members, or people who choose to work from home that day can easily contact anyone in real-time, just like they’re in the studio with us. This is very important for the team, as it gives everyone flexibility while keeping us all feeling equally connected. It also allows our Discord community to see who’s working and see us in meetings like our daily scrum… It's just another fun way to share our work!

Here's our office, and you will see mic booms at each desk for our online meetings and Firesides.

Here's our team on Discord.

The only communication tools we use are Slack for written messages and file/link sharing and Discord for voice and screen sharing. It’s really important that we keep things simple and accessible when it comes to communication!

The 81monkeys design process

Game development is never simple or “clean”. It’s a messy process full of unknowns and constant learning; it’s also wickedly complex and fraught with pitfalls. To make matters worse, attempting to simplify it or over-engineer the process can hinder the final product and limit innovation… But it’s nothing that an experienced team like ours can’t handle.

Game development falls into three main buckets, Design, Art, and Development. We work hard to learn as much about our features during the design phase as possible, because the better job we do during design, the easier and faster it can be brought to life, and the more likely it will work with the rest of the game. This is where our process really shines! We’re so good at it in fact, that more often than not, our in-game features and UIs match our designs almost one to one. I could go on about all the benefits that this process brings such as enhanced creativity and innovation, but I’ll spare you for now.

We achieve this by creating designs that are more prototypes than design documents. Once I have a design roughed out and feel confident in the approach after getting feedback from other design team members, I turn it into a storyboard animatic using wireframing software. There are a few reasons why this approach works so well for us. The biggest reason is that when people see the animatic, they are able to understand it as if they were watching gameplay footage. It also helps flush out the little details, like how an icon moves or what happens when the player presses a button. And it’s WAY faster to iterate and try new things out using wireframe animatics than it is during the art or development phases.

 Some devs will tell you, “You can’t get quality feedback until the feature is prototyped or working in the game!” In fact, I know some larger studios that almost entirely skip the design phase and just move straight into developing their ideas. One of them recently canceled a game they were working on for 3 years… This is an inefficient way to make games in my opinion. It takes a long time to write code just to test and iterate on game mechanics.

We even have a presentation that I review with all new team members.

Now you may be wondering, what does this look like for World of Anterra? Well, here you go!

Here's the process in action. This is one small section of our inventory screen, and this animatic shows the mechanic of dragging items into the world from the player’s inventory. This was not the original design, in fact we had tons of different ones… 

Also, you will notice some changes and additions in the final version. This is because we don’t update completed animatics once they’ve served their purpose.

Design animatic:

Alpha Gameplay Dropping Items:

This process has been used for all the core game mechanics. We have lengthy animatics for everything from combat to dialogue. But there are always outliners, or sometimes I just don’t have the bandwidth to prepare a proper design in time for a developer to get started. It's fine though, we’re not trying to be perfect.

Here’s an example of a feature moving through the phases (design, art, development). This is our merchant and trading screen. We tried a bunch of different ideas during the design phase. We tried a scroll, a book, we even tried to “zoom” in on the counter like we do with containers, but ultimately, we preferred keeping it clean by integrating it into the dialogue panels. It also made it easier to have the merchant speak to the player while they shop.

Design Document: 

We always try to use an in-game screenshot when possible and just add the wireframe elements overtop. This is just one of dozens of wireframes for the merchant UI flow. And we also have an animatic that walks through the whole thing.

Art Mockup: 

As you can see, this mockup uses a similar screenshot and there are also separate mockups for each state merchant UX.

Alpha Gameplay Merchant UI:

It’s still missing a few small things, but it’s fully functional! Which brings us to the next point… us to the next point…

Managing feature creep and expectations

We like to stay flexible an open to new ideas while we're developing a game. Some of our best ideas come mid development! One of the challenges of focusing on flexibility while developing a video game, is you don’t want to be TOO flexible. You want to manage the expectations of your team and audience and sometimes you need to draw a line in the sand. We do this by creating phases for a features scope, so phase 1 would be feature complete and “good enough” to be in the game as is. Phase 2 can be things like polish, improved animations, and high-value "wish list" items, and phase 3 would be the full dream vision for the feature. Phase 3 can also be considered the “if we had no constraints”, this is how we would make it work and look. Sometimes the dream vision is not too hard to achieve and so we green light it, which brings me to my last point that I would like to share with you. How do we assess the importance of a feature when the game has so many? Well, we like to keep this really simple as well. We rate our features and game mechanics in two categories, Engagement and Effort:

•  Engagementrepresents how important we feel this feature will be for the player. (This is where you come in! Your feedback, ideas and comments help us understand what's important to our community.) We rate this out of 10. 
•  Effort is the days we think the feature will take to develop. So for example, we’ve rated fishing as a 7 for Engagement and is expected to take a developer 10 days to complete.

This way we can easily compare features and understand priorities.

I hope that this helps you understand not just how we make games, but how committed we are to our craft. And gives those who need it, more confidence in our ability to complete World of Anterra.

Announcement time!

As far as we know, this is a first for any indie game dev! We are planning to host our morning huddle (we call it scrum) live on Discord for the next 2 weeks... That means that anyone is welcome to hop in and listen to use discuss our work for the day. These meetings usually only last about 10 minutes and begin at 10 AM. We think this will be fun way to share our work. Hope you can join us one morning. You can even take a moment to think about the work you plan to complete that day and share it in the chat channel!

Cheers!

Stephane - Game Director @ 81monkeys

Alpha Demo Gameplay - First 15 minutes
about 1 year ago – Sat, Aug 26, 2023 at 08:55:02 PM

It’s been a while since our last update. Thanks for being patient with us! Your continued support means the world to our team and helps keep us focused on the goal of making the best version of World of Anterra possible. It’s worth pointing out that the only reason we haven’t shared an update sooner is because we’re all so focused on the game! We have 12 people working hard every day and we have had no downtime since our Kickstarter ended. Now that we’ve completed our current milestones, we’re ready to share some more gameplay footage!

Our updates will all be public going forward. Until now, we kept them as “backer only” because we liked keeping things a bit more exclusive to our Kickstarter community. It’s now time to share our work with the world! We also have some exciting plans to share our work more openly with the community, so stay tuned for more on this in the coming days.

Over the next few months, we will be sharing new updates and announcements, as well as resharing some of our older content so they can also be public here. We will also be updating our FAQ section, so feel free to post any questions you have.

We’re so proud to be sharing our first long-form gameplay video. This video shows off the first 15 minutes of our “alpha” demo. There are a few things to note when watching the video.

• It does not show all the features or content in the game. 
• There are some missing elements like UI and UX polish.
• We have cinematics planned for the demo, including for the opening scene, but the video highlights some of our approach to storytelling.
• This is also the first time that we’re showing off our combat. We plan to make a more in-depth feature showcase, but for now we’ve added some notes on combat below the video.

It’s important that we get the mechanics right before adding layers of polish or supporting mechanics and UI/UX. If you see something missing or out of place, rest assured that we’re aware and have it in our roadmap. We’re focusing our attention on polishing the demo, adding content and enhancing the gameplay loop. We hope you enjoy the video as much as we do!

Quick-Time Combat

In this video you will see the player perform quick-time attacks and defensive moves. It’s still a bit rough, as we needed to have everything else working and bug-free before adding any real-time systems. We plan to improve the visuals and overall feel, but we’re really happy with where it’s at right now. Our approach to blending quick-time elements with turn-based combat has completely transformed our party-based combat experience! We believe that this is a game changer and we can’t wait for you to try it out.

Here’s how it works.

Our goal has always been to create a fast-paced, UI free combat experience. This means that quick-time events will not use icons or meters and will instead rely on character and enemy animations to cue the player. These skill-based actions will not completely override the “dice roll” systems that come with turn-based combat, but instead augment them in the player’s favour when completed successfully.

Quick-Time Attacks

• When attacking, press and hold the attack button and release at the right time to perform a quick-time attack. Tapping the attack button will make you instantly attack, so quick-time attacks are optional, and can be reserved for more challenging opponents… but it’s always fun to land a good blow!

Quick-Time Defending

• When an opponent is attacking a party member, press the action button just as your opponent strikes to improve your defenses. Quick-time dodging, or defending is also optional.

Quick-time events are unique based on the weapons and equipment being used, so a character holding a shield will respond differently than with no shield. Weapons and equipment will also have abilities/talents that can add or change how quick-time events work. Enemy types will also have their own unique attacks and timing for you to learn and master.

Thanks again for your continued support. 😊Much love from everyone at 81monkeys!❤️