Pre-production

Chad and I had been thinking about this game for a long time. We developed a lot of concept art and basically all the gameplay rules had been hashed out on paper and in our heads long before we started coding. We shared a unified vision of what we wanted the game to become and that continually motivated us in the right direction throughout the development process.

We knew that we wanted to be able to control a flock of birds to act as different resources in the game. We decided that they could be used as homing missiles for attacking, they would swirl around you to defend, and you could sacrifice them temporarily for health. This was the basis of the gameplay.

The huge monsters stemmed from our love of Shadow of the Colossus. We wanted to have this theme of being overwhelmed by a seemingly insurmountable enemy. Well, neither Chad nor I are artists, so we came up with the idea of stringing together nodes in different ways to form these creatures we called Hydra. Each Hydra would be a fully articulated, flying fortress that you had to fight. As you can see from the concept art, we have come a long way, but the main idea is very much intact.

Engine Proof

This was the first official build of the game. We didn't focus a lot on the visuals of it because we knew exactly what we wanted to have later. Our main focus was building the engine so that we could complete as many gameplay features as possible.

You can see from the first screenshot that the play is represented by the pyramid with the bounding sphere around it. An early version of the defense mode circling was also working at that point, as well as the ability to send your birds off to attack the main node. They would simply fly off, hit it and come back. No targeting was available.

In the second screenshot you can see an early version of a Hydra. This is more of a proof of concept rather than a real Hydra, through. It is comprised entirely of rigidly connected nodes, and they are anchored by the main center node.

First Playable

Although the game made a huge visual leap from the previous milestone to the current one, it was just small changes. The most noticeable change is the beautiful skybox, which was a default with a skybox generator we found.

You can see from the first screenshot that the flock is spinning around the player; this defense feature was also tweaked since the previous build. Also, this is the first appearance of the star of the game, the serpent-like Hydra. We wanted something that could show off the constrained connections as well as the smooth Bezier curve that he follows.

In the second screenshot you can get a good look at the Hydra. Notice the yellow nodes; this is the early implementation of the targeting system. We have a hexagonal reticule in the center of the screen, and you would simply paint the nodes to target them. After releasing the mouse button, the birds would fly off to attack their respective targets and then come back to you.

Pre-alpha

Yet another huge visual leap!

From the first screenshot the most apparent thing is the new skybox. We wanted to have something that we created ourselves. The previous skybox garnered a lot of compliments but we felt it was misleading considering that it was placeholder art. Furthermore, we had a different idea of what the game would look like in the end. So we have this greenish-gray skybox complete with clouds formed from particle systems. This really helped to fill out the space of the game and give a sense of depth and volume.

Other major changes in the visuals are the Rez-like targeting reticule, the arrowhead model for all the birds, and the particle systems on the life nodes.

This was a huge leap in gameplay as well. You can see that the Hydra has little red birds that follow it as well. We dubbed these "Hive Nodes", and the Hydra will send off his own flocks if you get near or attack it. Furthermore, you can see in the lower screenshot that there is a beam extending from the tail toward you. This was the laser attack node, which was later cut because it was just too difficult to balance the damage and aiming.

The most major change in the gameplay was the simple fact you could now defeat the Hydra to completion. Attacking the nodes would make them shrink to depict their health, and you must defeat the glowing life nodes in successive order to defeat the entire thing.

Alpha

Alpha represents an important turning point of the project. We had career day right before this milestone so it was important to us to have basically all the gameplay features in and working to show prospective employers. You might notice that the skybox is different yet again. We wanted a background that was more color neutral as not to detract from the sharp dichotomy of the red vs. blue of the player and the Hydra. This dark, dreary, cloud world was perfect for that.

In the second picture you might notice two things. First, there are now trails behind the flock mates when they attack. This was both a stylistic as well as a logistical decision. It simply made it easier to tell where they were going and it looked cooler. Second, the yellow capsules sailing through the air are bullets from the "machine-gun node". This is pretty much self explanatory. It definitely made the Hydra more of a threat, to the point where our play testers were getting frustrated. Up until this point, the game really seemed like shooting fish in a barrel because the Hydra was basically defenseless.

Beta

It should be noted that up until career day, Chad and I worked on the game constantly. It was to the point that we neglected the work of all our other classes simply to cram as much stuff into the Alpha/Career Day build as possible. With that said, we slacked off a little up to beta. That was due to many reasons, we had to catch up in other classes and we were both actively looking for a job.

A few important things did happen on this milestone. The level flow was put in so that you could fight a series of Hydrae, one after another. You can see from the screenshots that there is a new Hydra as well. We labeled him the Kite-boss because of his huge flowing cloth segments. Another pretty important gameplay change can be seen in the second screenshot. We decided that it would be best if the player dashing was linked to the birds as well. So now you have to temporarily sacrifice a bird in order to get a speed boost.

Gold

In every game that I have worked on, there has always been a mad dash at the end of the project to get all the features possible in there as well as fix bugs and tweak gameplay. This is no exception.

Most importantly, we added a couple of Hydra to fill out the gameplay. The first one is really small and is basically a tutorial section. Prompts show up on the screen and tell you the controls and how the game works.

The next Hydra that was created we call the Fish-boss. This guy was designed and created in about a day by Chad and I. We basically sat down, had a couple of beers and drew some pictures. The next day we put it together and tested it out. It is probably my favorite Hydra.

A lot of games have cool features that make people say "wow", we think the Hydra in our game are pretty cool but I think the coolest feature we have is our pause screen. It sounds ridiculous but it’s very cool. We got this feature working a week before the game was due. When you pause the game, black letterboxes slowly collapse in and the game freezes, the camera pulls away from the player and rotates around. When you see it in action it is very cool, especially if you are in a dangerous situation with birds and bullets surrounding you. Check out the video in the media section to see what I mean.

The Future

This game means a lot to Chad and I.

When we started this project we had some goals. We wanted to accurately bring our vision of the game from concept to fruition, we also wanted this game to help us gets jobs in the industry, and lastly, we wanted to win some sort of award. Now maybe "Empyreal Nocturne" wins an award sometime this year, and maybe not. We're not going to be disappointed if it doesn't but its good to have goals.

With that being said, we plan to work on the game over the course of the summer so that it can better contend for some of the major game competitions (Slamdance and IGF). We have some ideas for things that will be changed, fixed and updated. When we get to the end of summer and the game is different, then I will post those changes.