WHAT'S IN A NAME?

We have been struggling for the longest time to agree on a title for the game, but names are hard!

It had to be evocative and capture the essence of the game. We also wanted it to give a tiny insight into the narrative, but nothing too obvious. We think we might have got it.

Without further ado, here it is:

So whaddaya think? Did you get it? Nah, probably not. Don't worry though, it'll all make sense in the end.

!!!VILLAINS!!!

Some more works in progress of some villains we have been conceptualising.

The concept for the game's villains have changed dramatically over the course of pre- production and will probably change again before the game reaches the final stage ( ha! get it). I'm  really trying to push a lot of variety into the character designs.

Right now we are trying to determine what the level of difference in the enemies in our game should be. We know it's going to be a fine balance between having amazing character designs and enough variants of the same designs to create a whole new look, with out looking like we just stuck together the same character in a different way. This is where we take a lesson from Streets of Rage.

Streets of Rage enemies, same guy different coloured pants. 

The old school Streets of Rage formula of changing the enemies shirt, pants, colour is an interesting theory. It's the simplest and most visual way of determining a difference in difficulty of an enemy, without having to completely design a new character. It's also interesting to think that just by the colour alone the enemy suggests a different capacity, for example they may do the exactly the same moves but they take more damage. An easy solution for designers. But changing these character's colours was also probably subject to the nature of the limited graphics. In Streets of Rage, they make the character  difference quite obvious probably to combat the game's rendering process, which would output the characters and environment in the same method. Unlike the luxuries of today where you can just add some environmental fog or some particle effects to fade the background out and make the characters pop forward.

I think there is a lot to be said of how technology can dramatically  dictate the visual aesthetics of games. It's why the 8 bit look has become an iconic part of 80's culture and throw backs to the 8 bit look are easily associated with that time. It's a mass cultural influence, you can't deny it!

STILL ALIVE, STILL GOING.

Yes it's been a while, but we still are kickin'. We slammed the script after many revisions and have done a lot of unity tests, and now, we can finally cross pre-production off our ever growing list of what needs to be done. A new era has begun! an era of er...production.

A huge hurdle and one that hasn't been completely resolved yet has been versioning control. Our initial experiments were done directly in unity but due to the heavy handed visual nature of the game, it made it near impossible to collaborate over the web on the same project. Enter google documents/drive.

A Simplified Version of Level 1 in a Google Doc.

We decided after much deliberation and accidentally saving over each other versions of unity projects, that we needed a better method to developing each level.  We went with a symbolic approach, this way we would keep  the documents light and easily to manoeuvre through. We are now building each level in a google image document. I love it for many reasons. It's vector based so it's extremely light weight; we are both able to draw simultaneously in  the same document, which is too cool; we can add any necessary level comments and notes and link them to objects we've drawn; and even do google searches with in the document for photo references. It has increased our productivity ten fold. Awesome stuff. Yo can see an idea of the first level above.

From here our plan is to export the file into Unity and start building over the top of the level sketch. The next impending question  is how do we collaborate in an effective manner in Unity. Stay Tuned...

NOW HIRING!

  

ANALOGUE MASTERING

I have spent the past week organising the mastering for 'Climbing out of trees'. I had spent the previous month before that trying to teach myself how to do the mastering.

Never do that, ever.

That sent me into a weird, introspective place where I formed abusive, dysfunctional relationships with digital plug-ins and emulated compressors.  I was demanding more from them than they were capable of and in return they were intentionally sabotaging my progress to spite me. On top of that, I'm convinced that my studio monitors were lying to me throughout the process.

After about two dozen aborted attempts and at least as many grown-man tantrums I conceded and got in contact with Cparis. They specialise in analogue mastering and use some particularly tasty equipment, the crown jewel of which being their 1959 Fairchild 670 limiter. That might not mean much to most of you, but let me explain. Fairchilds are hand wired, all valve and each one is a little box of pop music history. Legend has it that the first batch of Fairchilds were built in Les Paul's basement, Emmerick used one pretty extensively while working with The Beatles and nowadays they fetch about $30,000 a pop. 

The benefit of all this is that it simply makes things sound good. You can listen to the final mastered version of the song on the media player at the top of this post or you can download it for free here. (For those of you who already downloaded the original version it is advisable to upgrade to this new mastered version).

Inside a Fairchild 670

LEVEL CONCEPT REVISON

I had an epiphany one night, looking at the concept level for our game, I had noticed I had been constructing a game based upon the tools available at hand. Like I had envisioned visuals based upon what I had seen in other games. It was as if I was making a homage to other games but it was not in any way personal.

 I think at some point we are all heavily influenced by the inspiration around us, and that we forget to put our own experiences into what we do. I've noticed it exists in a lot of industries, like when film idea's are  based upon premises that people know and have seen in other movies before. The shots become typical, the dialogue sluggish and the whole experience becomes overly predictable. Ideas that are self referential, in a manner of speaking. But when artwork in any medium comes along that uses personal experience and a mix of an extroverted and an expeditionary method of creation and embodies a truly reflective process it becomes a breath of fresh air to an often overly crowded landscape.

In short I felt a strong sense of duty to myself and past experience, to push these concepts into the game and as a result I produced a new approach to the aesthetic. A more textural and emotive environment, one that relates to the events that our main protagonist Harry experiences throughout the narrative.

HARRY AND ENEMEY TURNAROUND

The initial method for creating the characters was to produce clean line animations which would contrast with the painterly background of the game. The idea behind this process is to allow the user to identify where the character is on screen a lot easier, preventing the action being lost in the background assets. A personal design goal in this game is to build aesthetics that are textural and detailed that really project a mood, yet don't compete with the on screen action.

The two turnarounds are of the main protagonist, Harry and an enemy that will be used in the prototype level. These turnarounds will be used to produce either 3d models or used as a guide line for 2d animation.

 The enemy is definitely rocking' the eighties fashion...all the way!

CONCEPT LEVEL DEVELOPMENT

Here is the work up of the concept for the first level of the game. The process was completely digital and an interesting adventure, I'll let the images speak for themselves. From here on in we've decided on building a small test level in unity to inform us of the best way to design the level. It will also help us design the general mechanics and interactivity that we will use through out the game.

DESTROY SUBRUBIA

 Ok, the level design for the game is slowly progressing, the idea behind the level design was to give a strong sense of environment  in which the characters truly meld into the background. A visual style that I wanted to push into this game was organic painterly backdrops, lush with colour and detail, like something out of Studio Ghibli film.

But before all of that I hit the drawing board and produced some key frame ideas for the look of some of the levels. The first was inspired by the concept of the protagonist 'Harry' traveling through a destroyed suburbia, in short dilapidated buildings, cracked roads and a bucket load of enemies. The second was what we dubbed the "Purgatory" level a short level in which Harry gets warped into by an enemy and must find his way out.

The frames on the  sketches are suggested 'screen zooms' that will change depending on the number of enemies on screen, but more on that later.

Check it out. More to come soon.

CLIMBING OUT OF TREES

'Climbing out of trees' is the overture for the game. The brief for the track was to set the mood and atmosphere for the narrative, art style and soundtrack . So it had to be a bit dark and dreamlike with a vintage flavour. Basically it's a handful of crunchy, retro croutons floating in a bowl of surrealist gazpacho... if that makes it any clearer. The track will be played over the opening credits and during the start screen and demo reel whenever you start the game up.

To try and give the soundtrack a little bit of a retro edge I went and dug up some old drum samples, something similar to what you'd find on an 80's digital synth. I kept the drums simple, only using 5 different samples throughout  and the only effects I applied were a bit of distortion through an emulated bass amp and a bit of EQ'ing.

The most important influence in the vintage styling on the track is the synthesizer work. I have been exclusively using Moog's Animoog synth app for the iPad, which is five shades of radical. The app only cost 99c (which is the total cost of the soundtrack budget so far). Almost all of what you hear on the track was done using the Animoog app, with the exceptions being the drums and the lead part during the crescendo.

Trying to make the track dark and ethereal was a little trickier. I fiddled around with dozens of combinations of synth tambres and modes for the scales before I stumbled onto one of the synths presets that suited the mood perfectly. The other thing I did to make it a bit more spacey was to stew anything important in the mix in about eight litres of reverb.

The aforementioned lead part for the crescendo was a little bit of a fortunate accident. I write most of my lead sections by recording myself singing them first and then transposing them for an instrument later. In order to try and make the place-holder recording of my voice fit into the mix I applied a few extreme effects (distortion and reverb). Once I had it sitting nice and snugly it was pretty obvious that I wasn't going to be able to replace it with anything. And so we are left with the glorious 'angry midget wailing on a mountain top' effect that has made its way into the final cut.

If you would like to download the track to listen to later click here. Just click the arrow on the right of the song to download for free.

WELCOME TO DOUBLE VISION GAMES

Imagine that Streets of Rage is a man, and that Limbo is a woman.

By chance she stumbled into his regular smoke-stained, whiskey-drenched, gravity well. He could tell her type from a mile away, the wet slap of her Birkenstocks gave her away long before she sat down. Her head was still spinning after simultaneously flunking out of art school and losing her graveyard shift as a projectionist at the community cinema in the same afternoon. He wasn't sure of what had just happened to this girl, but he did know that she probably hadn't come down here to get pestered by some washed-up drunk. They drank at opposite ends of the bar, consciously ignoring one another. When last drinks were called they both grimaced through their last rounds and clambered for the door. Her comfort sandals slipped in a puddle of rain, his instincts grasped her before she toppled. His burly simplicity was so reassuring. Her fragile complexity so intoxicating. By the time the door had flung closed behind them they were already writhing on top of each other in the drowning stairwell.

And lo, the seed of our yet to be titled game was planted!

For the past few months we have been laboriously fleshing out the narrative and play mechanics of our first game. We are also getting into the finer detail of the art style and sound design.Over the coming months we will be making regular updates to the blog with new concept art and music accompanied by detailed insights into the processes we used to make them. 

This project is going to have a huge emphasis on aesthetics, which we are really hoping will make people fall in love with the atmosphere and setting as much as the plot and play style. Our aim with this blog is to try to give you as much of an uncensored look into the development process as possible. Basically you will be seeing the art style and game mechanics develop as we do.

We would be pretty psyched to hear from you throughout the process, so post any comments or feedback you have right here on the blog or our facebook page. You can also email us directly at contact@doublevisiongames.org.

We'll have some more updates for you soon.

Luke Rion & Luke Mangelsdorf