Aeon of Sands

Monthly Update: April

Hello,
Marco here, writing from a wet corner of Italy, with spring just around the corner, strutting around like a whimsical young lady, promising she has places to go.
So I better keep this April update short, to go join her out for a bit!

Graphics

Last month saw me basically going on creating NPCs and monsters, as I anticipated in March post.
This is a task that, punctuated by some minor fixing of other assets' graphics, or maybe creating acid spitting traps, or scribbling mysterious symbols on wall' plaques, is taking more time than I thought.

But I'm getting there, as this nice guy, see below, testifies. Word of warning: it's a sucker for love. Don't let it get to close to show its affection!

A centipede, a bit of combat, and two spells in action

Gameplay

Meanwhile in the not so cold Germany, the sun is shining too on Florian. This month he managed to advance his dungeon building task and to cram thousands of little features into the game: the stacking of inventory items like ammunitions, and the addition of a new particle system.

Therefore we have updated APE@Github, a particle Editor Tool originally created by mkdxdx for the LÖVE2D game engine. If you wanna play around with this little neat tool, just grab it here: ape_v3.love .

Particle Editor in action

That's it for this month! We save video teaser and music talks for later, as our plans on them go forward on a separate track from the main game's one,

I plan to complete most of the graphic assets for the whole game in may, maybe june at most. After that, for me, it will be only polishing, testing, and marketing!

Marco Pedrana, slacker half of Two Bits Kid, artist, spring lover. I take naps.

Monthly Update: March

Hello everybody! As you can see, we skipped the updates for January and February, while, as anticipated, we worked on the backgrounds and walls for the dungeons, and the remaining story illustrations.

We're happy to tell you that all of them are now done and gone!

Graphics and Gameplay

As it happened, in January, Marco created a totally new ambientation, that we add to 'The Ruin', a place that will hold an estimated 2 - 3 hours sidequest.

Setrani walks through a ruin, from game

It's a special place, and one for which Florian is creating new challenges right now, among which, a puzzle with tower defense mechanics, that we'll get to test, in their early form tomorrow already!

As the settings graphics are completed, Marco has moved to the NPCs and monsters; beside the demo ones, (rats and undeads that you should be familiar with, by now), the list of them accounts for more than 30 different opponents, with about 10 frames of animation each.

Half of them, roughly, are humanoids, of the various tribes that live in the desert that is Aeon of Sands, while the rest is, well, other stuff :)

Three different animation sets for humanoid NPCs

Audio

In the last days of December, we started working with a talented musician and great friend, Gabriele Artuso, who is creating the theme for the game, and many great tracks besides.

We are saving a special blog post for his contribution, let us just say here that to use live recorded traditional instruments as base for the game soundtrack is both a challenge and exhilarating!

Roadmap

Ideally before the end of April, but realistically on the next three months, we plan to work on the following tasks:

complete all NPCs and monsters in game!
finish at least 2 large dungeons
record the video teaser
prepare for the Greenlight campaign!

After that, only dungeon creation, gameplay finetuning, test and marketing until the end!

So stay with us, and remember to follow us on your social site of preference, Twitter, Facebook or Google+, to get the snippets from the development as fresh as they come, and help us spread the word!

Setrani: Misgivings. Roleplaying the Hero

In my dreams, I flee.

Since I was a kid, I run during the night, so much that is it any wonder that I don't want to do anything during the day?

One time, it's a creature half man, half bull, running on the walls with an axe; a few times it's the guards, or the force of gravity, then it's spies, a tiny spider, chinchillas...

Last night it was epic: a lost civilization, moving labyrinths, dark abyss, yellow train stations in the summer sun in the '70s, and Lovecraftian cultists, who glue on my teeth a sticky slime to have a magical second sight.

Anyway, the recurring element of these dreams is that sooner or later during the flight, I step through a non-existant forest along the railroad in my backyards, each time feeling the thrill of the as-fast-as-possible getaway from home, and my pleasure at my escape route of choice, which I'm sure my pursuers will fathom just too late. And so I run along the railroad trail, from my town to the next, and then I wonder where to go, like I'm not knowing any place after that, or I'm struggling too hard to imagine things, I'm at a loss.

In short, it doesn't matter: it only matters that I know these woods at night, that they don't exist but that I love them, and that I run, and how magnificent is that thrill!
How beautiful that flight, crazy, terrified, forgetful of all ties, traitor of all pacts, mindful only of my salvation.

In my dreams, I embrace my secret call to cowardice.

The above, in a nutshell is Setrani: his motivations, what he cares for, his character.
Law abiding to a fault during the day, he looks with hostility on the hostile environment outside his shell, a self-content bother-me-not city clerk, forced, as the game starts, out in the desert, to face a challenge from which he cannot escape.

While the above is about Setrani's character, Setrani's behaviour, instead, is something about you, the game player: will he stick to his basic impulse to self-preservation at all costs, or will he weigh in the greater good into his decisions? Will he not take sides except his own, or not even that, or, rather, try to look past sides entirely? That's your call!

The general story will happen or not, regardless of Setrani's choices and behaviour: he is only a character in a larger play.
However, the choices available to him (that is, you) will affect the point of view on that story, the experience of that play, as well as how some events will turn out.

Marco Pedrana, the daydreamer, good for nothing half of Two Bits Kid, artist, liar, cowardly backstabber, I don't have red hair.

Developer Diary - Shader and Pixelart Technology

SiENcE

My name is Florian and i'm one part of TwoBitKids. I'm coding the game, create gameplay mechanics and do parts of the level design. I code games for over 10 years now (i.e. Ultima Iris, an 3D client for Ultima Online).

Today I want to describe to you how we combine pixelart with shader technology to change scene ambience.

2D equals 3D ?

All games use either OpenGL or Direct3D and these APIs are clearly made for 3D. 2D is only a complicated abstraction and reduction of these APIs.

That's why in my opinion all current video games are 3D games and can use shaders.

There are 3 types of shaders:

Pixel Shader attempt to manipulate the color of each pixel of a given texture. They are used to define the material of the surface (reflection, refraction).
Vertex Shader attempt to manipulate the vertices. They are mostly used for 3D to transform your polygons and meshes.
Geometry Shaders are processed after vertex shaders and are used for rendering hair or shadow volumes.

Most 2D games only use pixel shaders, because the vertices or geometry is fixed to stick onto the pixel grid. When 2D games use pixel shaders, they only try to change the material (color) of their sprites. When speaking of changing the color of a pixel I not only mean red, blue and green, but also the whole ambience of a scene.
Here steps in: Color Grading.

Color Grading variations with random LUT Tables

Color Grading

Color Grading is a technique used in movies for changing the ambience of scenes. It's mostly used for changing Brightness, Saturation or Contrast. But you can also change the curves of bright and dark areas and do selective changes to colors.

In Aeon of Sands we use color grading to change the ambience of the game in certain scenes or situations like day, night, combat or with spell effects.

Here you can see how a scene can change its mood from day to sunset to night.

Day

Sunset

Night

To use color grading in video games, you need a color grading shader and a so called LUT table (3D color lookup table). In the pictures above, the only thing we have changed was background and the lut table.

Here is the standard 16bit lut table...

and a modified one.

If you want to get informed about Aeon of Sands news, subscribe to our mailinglist.

If you want to try color-grading for yourself, read the following references:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ColorGrading.html
http://kpulv.com/359/Dev_Log__Color_Grading_Shader/