Hey, it’s Joe back again for a roundup of everything we’ve been sharing over the past couple of weeks. This time that includes a bit more than just the standard screenshots & gifs.

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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!

Hey everyone,

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. **

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.

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!

Hey guys,

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.

Cheers,

Joe

Hey everyone,

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!