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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As promised, here’s our bi-weekly round up of everything we’ve been throwing around on our social media pages. Enjoy!

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Hey, would you look at that. This place still exists!

We know it’s been kind of quiet over here on the devblog lately, so we’re taking a bit of a different tack. The previous longer, in-depth blogs will still pop up occasionally, but to keep things updated in between we’re going to start showing off the smaller stuff we already post on Twitter and Facebook.

So, every two weeks or so, we’ll be posting some nice new screenshots like the ones below. Check them out!

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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,

We’ve been a bit quiet lately while we’ve been building up our assets for Beacon, so we figured now would be a good time to round up some of our newest bits and pieces for show and tell.

You’ll already have seen the close up of Freja, our player character, above. We’ve shown small glimpses of her in the previous screenshots, but Tay put together a poster to give us a close look at the 3d model.

To go along with that, we’ve also got a better look at some of the enemies that belong to the ‘Solus’ faction. Hopefully in the below pics you’ll be able to clearly see the low-poly model style that we’re going for.

We’ve also got the landmark system that Arran talked about previously up and running with more possible variations, and Kiefen’s grabbed some great shots of it in action. The final shot also includes a glimpse of the potential height variation a map can have, with an elevator linking the two levels.

Last but not least, Arran’s got some new music to show off, starting with the menu theme.

That’s all for now, though I believe Tay has something up his sleeve that’ll be hitting before Christmas, so keep your eyes out for that along with other updates in the new year. Cheers!

- Joe

Hey Guys,

Phew, it’s been a while. We’re sorry for the radio silence over the last few weeks, but it was for good reason. On the one hand, we want to keep this development process as open as possible for people interested enough to follow it, but on the other hand, we really needed to collect our thoughts and prepare some stuff before we went out and showed this. Regardless, the big news this week is that Beacon is moving from 2d to 3d.

This was not a decision we made lightly, and it’s the closest the team has come to fighting each other bare-chested on a rooftop, but in the end it’s the decision that had to be made for a number of reasons. We’ll get to those reasons, as well as talking a bit about the upsides of this new approach, in a second. First, let’s address the biggest change that you’ll probably have already noticed.

Moving from 2d to 3d is obviously going to have an effect on our aesthetic. Given that that’s just about all we really had to show you guys up to this point, it’s understandable if you’re unsure about or even dislike the change. We set out to create a striking and unique 2d aesthetic, and in our move to 3d we’re aiming to keep as much of that aesthetic as possible, while still altering things to work well in 3d in its own right. The shots included in this post, and the higher-res ones that will accompany it in a photo post, are early examples of this new clean, low-poly aesthetic that we’re striving towards. Hopefully you’ll agree we’re on the right track.

So, let’s talk a bit about our reasoning behind the shift. The issue initially arose when we started looking around for a 2d animator - you might have noticed us advertising for one on Twitter and on previous devblogs. The Monothetic team’s previous experience is almost exclusively tied up in 3d work, and though Tay was spitting out great 2d artwork, none of us were really equipped to animate any of it. After a few weeks without success, we began looking at our options of animating it in-house. Obviously traditional 2d frame animation was sort of out of the question, given that we didn’t want to slow down or stop production while someone got to grips with it, but one possibility was modelling anything needing animations in 3d, then capturing those 3d animations from a number of preset angles and combining them into sprite sheets. This was discussed at great length, and at aggressively high volumes, among the team until something was pointed out; if we were going to have to model and animate stuff in 3d anyway, we might as well just move everything else into 3d as well.

The move to 3d doesn't only benefit our ability to actually produce animations, however. Perhaps the biggest benefit it brings is the ability for a whole bunch of our team to jump in on the creation of assets. Previously, because we wanted a consistent and cohesive aesthetic, asset creation rested almost entirely on Tay’s (admittedly blindingly fast) drawing skills. On top of that, given everyone’s familiarity with 3d, ideas are getting prototyped faster and features are being implemented with fewer problems.

Then there’s the stuff we had to set to the side or struggled with in 2d. Conveying depth, handling sorting layers, applying shadows - all of these were big ongoing problems for us in 2d, and they’re problems that simply stopped existing once we made the move. Of course 3d comes with its own problems, but they’re problems we’re accustomed to, and better equipped to handle.

So, let us know what you think of the slightly new look for the game! Hopefully before long we’ll be showing some bits and pieces in action. We promise you won’t have to wait so long for the next update.

Cheers,

Joe

P.S. there are probably a few other things we should address:

Does this mean you’re on a new engine?

We’re still using Unity, though obviously it’s the 3d toolsets rather than the 2d ones.

Does this severely delay the game?

No - with our new pipeline mentioned earlier, we should actually make better time than we would have otherwise. After a few weeks we’re close to where we were before in terms of art, and are already ahead on gameplay.