Hey guys, it’s been a while, we’ve been quite preoccupied with something big that we hope to share with you in the near future, but for now we’ll sit down and just have a small chat together. I’m Tay, the creative lead for Beacon and resident pug lover (although this title is still being hotly contested internally). Today I’m going to talk about something very unique and never before discussed in the gaming space : robots.
I thought about the logistics of such a facility for a while and came to the conclusion that it probably should be run by droids. They are cheap to mass produce (in the future), do not need rest, and don’t suffer from human error - although you will learn that hasn’t stopped things from going south. It was decided then that the Prism facility would be run by an army of droids of varying classes and specialties, manned by a skeleton crew of humans to oversee some maintenance and perform some good ol’ research and development.
As we began drafting ideas for what eventually became Beacon, one idea stuck throughout the whole process, and that is an abandoned planet populated by specimen that escaped from some sort of clandestine high-tech containment facility.
While the role of the droids and the facility came to us easily, designing them was a slightly more difficult task. The first problem was overcoming cliches of what droids are supposed to look like. I toyed with the idea of a non-humanoid form for the droids that puts function before aesthetic familiarity like TARS, but eventually fell back on the humanoid form as the silhouette will read better in an isometric game like Beacon. A modular humanoid base form also allows for a wide variety of tweaks and modifications which we knew would be needed to distinguish the various classes while maintaining a visual coherence.
Each faction in beacon will have a distinct “visual identity” that can be reduced to shapes, and for Prism we chose a hexagon. Here you can see me trying to incorporate the shape into some sort of kevlar for the droid but in the end I felt it was too rigid. The other question was about weapons, and how the droids should wield them. I decided against having them hold the weapons (a la Phantom Menace federation droids *shudders*) as it didn’t make sense for me to allow the possibility that the droids can drop something they would always be wielding. Instead, I chose to give them a cannon arm which are tailored to their specific class. It might seem a bit impractical but Beacon has a bit of a sci-fi camp flavour anyway so I just went with it. You can also see in the concept how I wanted to do a bit of a flipping arm cannon kind of deal that can rotate 360 degrees but I couldn’t think of a good way to communicate that well in a game where the view is very zoomed out so I let go of that one.
Now we will look at the base class of droids which I modeled relatively fast in Maya as a test, however the final design did not change much so the test models actually ended up in-game mostly intact.
Strangely enough the doodle that clicked for me had more organic forms, reminiscent of the bio-mecha from Evangelion. I had a penchant for faceless things so I just lopped the head off and stuck in a holographic head instead. With the head, I intend to slowly increase their complexity as their class gets higher, indicating their lethality. They also flicker and change color as the droid becomes more damaged, and in some cases, display strange shapes when they become infected with viruses.
Here you have a Security Droid, which is the most basic droid and shoots a rather unassuming sonic-based projectile at a slow pace. What they lack in firepower, however, they make up in numbers - as cannon fodders of the Prism droids they will easily swarm you if given the chance.
And then you have the Containment Droid, which, as the name implies, specializes in detaining specimen should an outbreak occur. It is more well-equipped than a Security Droid, very quick, and usually armed with a sonic shotgun or rapid-fire assault rifle. It can also deploy a Holoshield to block projectiles temporarily. Not exactly a welcoming sight in most cases.
In the same class as the Containment Droid you also have the Pyro Droid, which as the name suggests, is basically a terminator with a flamethrower. While the Pyro Droid moves slower than its counterpart, the jet of flames it shoots will linger in an area, rendering it temporarily inhospitable. A Pyro Droid will also explode upon death, spelling doom to unwary foes.
That is all I have for the droids to share so far, but this is only the tip of the iceberg in what is a vast droid army in the Prism facility and I hope to cover the faction as a whole some day down the line. Thanks again for reading! If you enjoyed it don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates! You can also follow me on Twitter if you wish to see me tweet weird pictures with no context.
Hey everyone, Kiefen here to talk about one of the most important aspects of a sci-fi game. CRATES. Beacon wouldn’t be a true sci-fi game if we didn’t inadvertently jam piles of crates in every even semi-applicable location. This blog will go through a few of the various applications of crates in Beacon.
There are 3 main purposes for crates in Beacon.
Loot - Crates that contain various treats for the player. Many of these are placed around landmarks and on level generation a low amount of them are chosen to spawn. When opened, they randomly spit out various items for the player including Health, Pickups (One time use items), and rarely Auxillary Items (Re-useable items with cooldowns) or Weapons from larger crates.
Cover - Crates that are placed to provide cover for the player. They are often placed in the middle of combat areas or near entrances to allow the player to maneuver around them to avoid fire from enemies.
Detail - Crates that are placed around as set dressing. Their only purpose in life is to look pretty and add a bit of faction specific interest to the environment.
A collection of the three uses for crates; Loot, Cover, and Set Dressing
As you may have noticed, whether a crate contains loot, is used for cover, or is just there for detail, it uses the same model. When we showed the game for the first time at EGX this caused quite a few issues with players trying the game for the first time, so I’ve started to create and follow a few “crate rules” to help distinguish between the various types of crates.
Loot - Uses white light to signify it’s unlocked and a pulsating icon to signify it contains loot. Can be on its own or nearby a stack of crates, as long as the loot crate itself is not part of the stack.
Cover - Stacked less haphazardly than Detail crates, and positioned in locations where it’s obvious to the player that it will provide cover. Nearly always a simple stack of two wide crates, as it’s obvious that it covers the height of the player and will block projectiles.
Detail - Should usually be in a stack of 3 or more crates,be stacked somewhat messily, and especially should never be a single crate on the ground. Even with the change in color and lack of pulsating icon, many players still attempt to open a crate located on its own. Should mainly be placed against walls or cliff edges to avoid interfering with pathing or gameplay.
A family of Prism crates in their natural habitat
Each faction will have their own style of crates, which will come in various sizes and contain faction-specific loot. The Occult, for example, will have a fine selection of breakable pottery. Here’s a sneak peek at the crates that will be located around the wreckage of Freja’s ship.
In a future blog post we’ll go into more detail about the various items that will be popping out of these crates for the player to make use of. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! Check back in the next few weeks for a new blog post!
It’s been a couple of months since we debuted Beacon publicly at EGX Rezzed in London, and we’re excited to announce that people in Manchester, UK will have another chance to get their hands on an early demo build.
As part of Manchester Day, and in association with Rock Paper Shotgun, Arran will be setting up shop in The Games Room with a new, updated build of Beacon for the public to get their greasy mitts on. He’ll be there on Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th June (i.e. this weekend) from roughly 10am to 5pm.
The event is free entry, so if you’re in the Manchester area and fancy stopping by and checking out our game in some crazy opulent surroundings, you can find out more on the Manchester Day website.
Hey everyone, it’s Kiefen here to talk about Beacon’s mutation system in detail for the first time. Seeing as it’s one of the main distinguishing features of the game, you’d think we would have revealed more info on it by now, but to be honest we only recently implemented it into the game. Now that we’ve spent the last couple weeks brainstorming more ideas, tweaking the statistics, and implementing the basic functionality of it we thought it was time to reveal more of it.
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Death
When we were just coming up with the initial idea for Beacon and brainstorming the theme and basic mechanics, Joe came to us with a document detailing an idea for utilizing death in a more interesting way than most other roguelikes. I had tried to write a paragraph to elegantly open you guys up to the idea here, but Joe wrote it better than I ever could in his original pitch document over a year ago. I’ve quoted it below, complete with his beautiful art.
“Death is everything in a Roguelike - it’s the beginning and end of pretty much every playthrough. It’s what you’re trying to avoid more than anything else, and your attempts are almost always going to be futile.
But Death is also a huge influence in Science Fiction. Basically everything was invented as a distraction from, or way to overcome, death. So if we were going to make a game about constantly dying in a genre where death is a major catalyst, it makes sense to marry them together with a cohesive mechanic & narrative framing device, right?”
And so Cloning became the basic drive for our game.
Cloning is what gives Beacon a sense of progression through multiple playthroughs; a feature lacking in most recent roguelikes. When you die, you won’t be sent back to the beginning of the game as if your previous playthrough never happened. Instead you’re cloned from the remains of your previous playthrough, in part using DNA collected from enemies you’ve killed, and sent back to the beginning of the game where your crashed ship’s clone bay is located. Cloning will both be used to provide a way for the player to build up their character over multiple playthroughs and to provide a vehicle for subtle narrative.
DNA Augments
Using DNA you collected from enemies in the previous playthrough, you said? Why yes, I did. Thanks for noticing! Every enemy in Beacon has a chance to drop a piece of their DNA, which you can then implement into your genome on death. Implementing a piece of DNA will both add and subtract to certain statistics from your character, allowing you to tailor your statistics to your playstyle. Want to forget you have a health bar? Focus on adding DNA with extra health to your genome at a loss of speed and accuracy. Want to get a critical hit every other shot? Focus on adding Accuracy for a loss of Stamina.
Each faction also has its own DNA with statistics that they favor positively and negatively. For example, Solus DNA is likely to have positive Accuracy and Speed but negative Health and Resistance.
Mutations
Mutations add another layer of progression to the cloning system on top of adjusting your stats with DNA. When you reintegrate DNA, there’s a chance that you’ll receive a mutation that can further affect your stats and even give you bonus abilities in game, with both positive and negative effects. Each mutation also has a unique visual effect that is added to the base player model when played. Below is Freja with two Tritoraptor mutations along with descriptions of their effects.
Bracing Scales - Your skin dries and cracks, with Tritoraptor scales beginning to peek out from underneath. The extreme initial pain is somewhat offset by the protection your new scales can offer.
30% Chance to be immune to any instance of damage taken.
Aerodynamic Tail - Your spine mutates and grows, forcing your tailbone out of your body and forming a primitive tail. You find yourself more agile and spry.
+25 Speed
Mutations also occur based on the faction of the DNA you reconstituted. For example, if you continually reconstitute Solus DNA, you will have a higher chance of receiving a Solus mutation. Each faction will have at least 5-10 mutations, but I won’t spoil any more of them for now.
That’s the basics of Beacon’s mutation system! We’ll do another blog on the intricacies of it in the future once we’ve tested more of what we have planned. To end off the blog post here’s a few updated photos of Beacon taken for our website recently!
Hi everyone. It’s been awhile since we’ve updated the blog, but today we’re remedying that with a proper EGX Rezzed post-mortem (also a bit late). In order to do this we will do the blog post in a quasi-interview format where several of our team members that were onsite will give their opinions on each topic. Hopefully this will be as interesting for you to read as it is for us to talk about!
Tay : One of the most exciting parts for me were showing a playable build to the public for the first time, and meeting some of our team members for the first time. Believe it or not, while we have known and worked with each other for years, some of us never met face-to-face, so that was definitely a good milestone.
Kiefen: It wasn’t very ceremonial when we met for the first time though after working together online for years. I just snuck up behind Arran and he didn’t notice me for a few minutes until I handed him his business cards.
Arran: Yeah, that was anticlimactic. I envisioned some grand entrance and everybody getting all excited and emotional. Nope, it was a literal ‘Oh hey, you’re a sneaky cat, what’s up?’
Tay: EGX was just all kinds of fun - being part of the Leftfield collection allowed us to really get a good grasp of what the community is doing and make connections with other awesome devs, which is something you can lack if you’re just working remotely like we do. Watching other people outside of the team play the game was initially a bit nerve racking as we weren’t sure if anyone would enjoy it in its buggy state but I think everything turned out alright.
Kiefen: That was the most exciting part of the event for me. I’ve never really seen anyone play something I’ve created before and it was really interesting to see how non-developers played the game. For example, nearly everyone tried to walk into the Prism Watchtower even though it’s currently just set dressing. None of us ever expected that since it’s just been a static model in the levels for months.
Arran: That happened without fail, to the point we could predict it 20 seconds beforehand (laughs)
Kiefen: The feedback we received was also much more positive than I was expecting. I can’t recall a single person who had a negative comment to give outside of the gameplay being rough right now which was completely expected. Everyone loved the presentation of the game and Arran got a lot of comments on the music being great.
Arran: Yeah, I really enjoyed being part of the show and talking to the public far more than I expected. I thought it was going to be one of those things I’d be pretty terrible at, but after a while, at least for me, it became sort of liberating to directly interact with hundreds of people and get all kinds of suggestions for the game. I think a lot of folks were surprised there were so many of us present at the booth (laughs). We had to occasionally pretend we weren’t paying attention, otherwise I think some people found it intimidating to hop onto the game!
(Arran and Joe watching an attendee play)
Meeting Other Developers
Tay : This was also a fun part of the event, especially in the Leftfield collection. There were some really unconventional games like Line Wobbler, a “one-dimensional dungeon crawler” and Taphobos, an “immersive coffin experience”.
Arran: I loved Line Wobbler. I went and played it twice (and beat it!). I chatted to Robin a couple of times during the show about the production costs and how he could actually market the game. Getting it installed in pubs and bars would be amazing. It was definitely the spectacle of the show.
Tay: We were right next to the Fossil Echo guys and had a nice chat with them - their art is quite gorgeous and they really put a lot of work into the game, it was much more complete than ours. Also popped in to see The Last Night, again, very beautiful art and I’m a huge sucker for cyberpunk, especially the Blade Runner aesthetic.
Arran: Danny Wadeson, the writer of The Last Night was a great dude to meet and chat to. I enjoyed discussing about Kentucky Route Zero, Darkest Dungeon and other great narrative games. I’m really looking forward to TLN since I last played the game jam version. The teaser trailer they had on display looked wonderful.
Kiefen: I enjoyed standing next to you guys and listening to you talk about those things.
Tay: At the end of the convention we had a chance to chat with my friend Aaron who is on the No Man’s Sky team and also met up with some guys from The Room at a pub. It was all good fun sharing some weirder tales of development and I would definitely do it again.
Arran: That was a good sendoff for the show. All of those guys were super great. I’d actually attended a talk Barry Meade (The Room) did at Animex early last year whilst I was still at Ubisoft, so it was great to meet with him in person.
Kiefen: It was kind of weird meeting with Aaron since he used to do some work on Canvas, as all of the rest of us did. I had never met him though but now he’s working on No Man’s Sky and we’ve got our own game we’re developing now. We are all big boys now, or at least more so than we were when we all worked on Canvas years ago.
Arran: The Convoy folks were great as well. We played the game properly for the first time in the most bizarre of scenarios, at a swanky city bar as part of the Beefjack event. Mad Max/FTL inspired roguelikes with deep mechanics/story don’t gel very well with noisy, bustling bars, but it was good fun all the same.
Kiefen: Yeah, if you enjoyed playing FTL definitely look out for Convoy. I’ll definitely get it once it comes out.
Arran: I also sneakily managed to get Rami Ismail of Vlambeer fame to come over to our booth and check out the game. He’s someone I have huge respect for in the industry, not for just the games he’s made, but the work he does for the community and culture in games. I mean, we even use presskit() ourselves! But he’s a busy guy, so I only had a few minutes to gush about everything. He thought the game looked pretty great from a visual standpoint. That was enough to make my day.
I was also lucky to meet quite a few folks at the show who I’d previously worked with or knew of in the industry & community. Friends from Playground Games, Creative Assembly, Polycount & the Idle Thumbs forums. It was a pleasure to see so many familiar (and new) faces about!
(EGX Attendee playing Beacon)
General Thoughts on the Event/Games we saw/Anything else
Arran: At first I thought the location was a super bizarre choice. My brain didn’t really appreciate the layout to begin with as I’m used to everything being lumped under one giant, smelly roof. Having everything self-contained in their own sections was actually pretty fantastic though. Attendees could pick and choose what they wanted to explore and that alleviated a lot of the foot traffic that typically congests hot spots at events.
Kiefen: The Leftfield Collection wasn’t in the greatest location of the building but we still had a lot of foot traffic. We were lucky enough to have our game placed right next to the door too so even people just popping in real quick would end up seeing our poster and often taking a card. I’m still upset about the lack of seating though!
Arran: That’s true. You hated all those seats.
Kiefen: If we go again we should bring foldable lawn chairs.
Arran: I didn’t really have much time to look around and play many games. I was mostly too scared to leave Beacon in case it broke. I did play (and BsoD’d) Volume (sorry Mike). It was pretty decent fun until it crashed. I also played Deep: An Occulus Rift game, which has some crazy contraption that measured your breathing. (Joe can you embed vines in tumblr?). Magic Shot: A procedurally generated billiards game (Think Desert Golfing). Also found the time to play Aerobat & The Adventures of Square. All great fun actually.
Tay : Yeah, I didn’t go around too much at all - in the end I was more interested in observing how people play Beacon and just chatting around. I did watch Arran play NOCT for a while, I could see the mounting confusion as he played, headphones would definitely have helped. I also scooted over to Eden Star to see if my friend was there but alas that wasn’t to be - the game shaped up real well though!
Arran: There were also some odd choices games I felt were pretty hard to demo at a noisy event. Life is Strange comes to mind. NOCT didn’t seem to translate with me very well in that environment. It was pretty difficult to get my bearings on the game because a lot of the atmosphere was lost due to the headphones not really working. Tis a shame because the aesthetic is gorgeous.
Also the I Am Bread booth was completely ridiculous.
(Arran getting feedback from an attendee who just played)
What We Learned
Tay : For me, it would be that the visual design is going in the right direction, which is a huge relief because I can sleep easier at night. I also noticed some things that we need to communicate better to the player visually, like what crates are just decorations and what contains loot, etc.
Arran: Yeah, mostly things that were frustrating for players just needed some kind of tweaking. More obvious communication on some elements in the world. Helping the player not get as lost in the environment, better usage of UI feedback, hit detection. That kind of thing. There’s also a lot we weren’t able to show, that will hopefully make better sense later down the line.
Tay: Although we had good feedback throughout the convention, I wonder if that will change with the anonymity of the internet once we begin our public playtests. Maybe we will get stoned.
Arran: I hope not (laughs). People are far more forgiving than I give them credit for. I’d like to think that a future public demo would enable players to conjure up any critiques to send our way, in their own time. I felt some folks were maybe a little withdrawn - feedback-wise - as they were put on the spot by us at the end of their playthrough.
Kiefen: It might have helped to have that digital survey to have people do at the end like we were planning, but I think that would have ended up being awkward especially since I didn’t see anyone else there consistently asking for feedback on their game since most of them weren’t nearly as early in development as us.
Our Roadmap
Tay : With the feedback from EGX in hand I feel that our goals are clarified and we are ready to fix or revise issues that we have discovered. A lot of the issues at EGX have been anticipated so I was quite happy with that as it shows we have a basic understanding of what will probably work. In the coming months I hope we can introduce some of our mutation mechanics into the gameplay and also tweak what existing gameplay we had so that it is more responsive and varied.
Arran: Yup. It definitely solidified that we are going in the right direction with this game. I’m really looking forward to unveiling new content, potentially releasing a demo soon and hopefully being able to take Beacon to lots of upcoming events. I want as many people to get their hands on it as possible!
Kiefen: We’ll be taking a few months to solidify what we have now before demoing the game again anywhere but yeah it was extremely useful exhibiting the game and I would like to do that more when we can.
Tay: Unfortunately, I will be taking a short hiatus from the project starting in May for a few months, so right now I am focused on cranking out as much art direction as possible for our upcoming assets and new tilesets. It’s going to be a challenge, but one that I enjoy setting myself to. Oh, and we need to do a trailer with proper announcements to press outlets at some point.
Kiefen: Yeah, it’s definitely time soon to do an official announcement with a trailer.
In Conclusion
We would like to thank all the people who stopped by to play our humble demo, and the Leftfield and EGX staff for making it happen! Special thanks to David Hayward who helped us a big deal leading up to and during the event, we would not have been there if it wasn’t for his efforts.
Here’s a few new treats also. Kiefen has been updating the Solus areas and Tay has designed Freja’s ship!
Watch this space for more news if we exhibit anywhere else!
Just a quick update to remind everyone that we’ll be setting up shop at EGX Rezzed from Thursday until Saturday this week, over in the Leftfield Collection.
The build we’re showing is an extremely early demo from the first area of Beacon, and as such it’s missing several major features that will make it into the final game. Nevertheless, we think there’s enough to give you an idea of the direction Beacon is heading in.
If you’re heading down to Rezzed, we look forward to seeing you. Myself (Joe), Arran, Kiefen and Tay will all be in attendance at various points throughout the show, and we’re looking forward to getting some reactions from people playing our game for the very first time.
Kiefen here again to talk a bit about creating models for Beacon. As we discussed in the previous blog about developing Beacon’s visual style, the models in Beacon are very simple. Most of our models completely lack smoothing groups, the textures are flat colors, and any small edges are simply done through a chamfer rather than baking a normal map as you can see below.
This was of course done to help create a visual identity for the game, but it also was done to decrease asset creation time. A huge bottleneck in our previous game was our art pipeline. We were developing on a pre-release version of UE4 in PBR with normals baked from a high poly for nearly every asset. For a 2-3 person art team like ours, paired with the scope of that game, this approach just wasn’t feasible. In fact, it actively hurt our ability to further develop other important parts of the game, such as implementing game mechanics, and was pushing us towards spending months on a slightly interactive art test.
I’ll go into a bit more depth while going through the process I went through to model out the Tritoraptor, one of the indigenous creatures from the planet Beacon takes place on. Below is the old 2D Sprite of the Tritoraptor that Tay drew for the previous version of the game, and which I basically used as concept art for the 3D model.
Here’s a quick block in of the Tritoraptor. I’m not the best at anatomy so right away the limbs look awkward and it’s way too wide, but the basic shape is there. I’ve also started to take into account the basic polygonal shapes that will determine the shading in game, specifically on the head here.
Here’s more progress on the block in, adding in all of the other shapes present in the reference. After getting some other opinions, I tweaked the anatomy a bit too.
The most noticeable feature of the Tritoraptor is still absent though - the glowing scales. I debated a few different ways to do them, but I ended up just modeling them all out as 2-4 triangle planes and scaling/rotating them around.
Next was texturing. As I said earlier, most of our environment models just use a solid color and don’t require any UVs or diffuse textures, but enemies usually make use of one for something. I did a quick diffuse on this to add in a gradient over the scales and add in glows for the eyes and neck, which don’t require a texture with a bloom shader but I might as well make use of it and make them a bit softer.
As you can see it’s extremely simple. There’s a slight gradient on the feet and scales but solid colors mixed with the lighting influence from the environment add more than enough detail for the game’s style when applied to the polygonal models.
The last step that I first tested while modeling this enemy is baking ambient occlusion. I hadn’t done AO for any of the previous models, but it added a lot of depth to the scales and popped with the selfillum making it read better in-game.
And finally the Tritoraptor in game. As you can see the shading is very simple. There’s a rimlight shader and a selfillum shader on most models, and otherwise it’s just lighting from various environmental influences.
And here’s a promotional card of the Tritoraptor.
Thanks for reading!
If you haven’t been checking up on the blog or our twitter, we’ll be at EGX displaying a very early build of Beacon next week from March 12th to March 14th!
17 Feb 2015
Which mutations will you achieve as you clone your way to victory?
