Acedia Game Design Progress

The most beautiful procedure of game production is writing the game design document, provided you are a designer!

And this applies, because in this state you can write everything that you can imagine, until of course the game producer jumps out of nowhere and tells you, that if we put all this stuff in production, the game will be completed in 2025… years from now.

So you must stop your imagination from going wild and you have to focus on more realistic goals.

So we have done all the aforementioned and we will present you some features of our game design and especially of our puzzle design.

Puzzle Design Implementation in Unreal Engine

Our story takes place on a time-forgotten, god-forsaken Island, infested with mystery around the legend of the 7 sins. You are there to investigate that mystery, and overcome anything that comes to your way… Are you the one to solve it?

More info on that coming up next week!

Until then, see ya!

Introducing Acedia

Hello everyone! 

In this blog post we want to share how we conceived the story of our new adventure game, but to be clear, we will inform you only about the main aspects of it.

It was Monday 15 June. After some additions to our team, we started working on a new project, a first person adventure game. However, the story was yet to be decided. Everyone was getting ready for our scheduled call. As we were talking about our progress, at some point, Kostas jumps out of nowhere and tells everyone that since our team consists of seven people we should take advantage of this number. George thought that this sounds pretty cool and started searching about how he could involve this number in a story. After some time, he recollected the movie Se7en and started to focus on the seven deadly sins and how he could involve them into a story.

Se7en movie

After some research, he found that in 1589 Peter Binsfeld has developed a theory which connects every deadly sin with a demon. George thought that this was enough information to make up a starting point for our story so he casually mentioned in the following call. 

Cover of Peter Binsfeld's book

Slowly, the story started to build up and George decided to search deeper for each sin and its corresponding demon. After a deep dive into various books he came up with a story and the core aspects were decided. If you want to learn more about this mysterious story, stay tuned.

See ya!!!

The mechanics behind the doors

Hello everyone!

This week we'll catch up with some programming! It may seem it's left behind, but without it, the game won't ever be a reality!

So, imagine you have a door right in front of you, or maybe to rephrase it, your CHARACTER has a door right in front of him. How should the overall interaction mechanic work?

There is actually a misconception on how the overall system works. As you'd expect, you simply hit the "Interact" button ( E ) on the door and then by moving the mouse you merely open or close the damn thing.

Actually, it's not that simple. Because it matters from which point you actually look at the door. and we are not even there yet! As we were testing our the overall interaction, we found out that the character's orientation towards that surface of the door matters as well.

So, how come a simple door-opening mechanic turns out to be such a code disaster? It's because of the numerous violent math calibrations, tests and adjustments that need to be made beforehand. That's even before we start coding!!!

So, as you can guess, the tough part was to design the whole mechanic and then cry in frustration, as the mechanic itself needed testing, and there were the newfound bugs!

The door had to have a specific joint on the wall, the door had to have specific angles, degrees if you like to keep it fully open and fully closed. A mechanism that controlled whether the door was absolutely closed or fully open had to be implemented, and some UX-friendly snapping mechanics were to be implemented to keep the player from losing his sanity (Yes, there is a sanity system!).

But, as it turned out, we were the ones losing our sanity after hours and hours and hours of design trying to find out which surface of the door the player is pointing at, and what's the player's orientation on that surface. Yes, he may be looking at the front surface, but the interaction mechanic would be different if the character would face the door on the right-most part or the left-most part because that would change the intended interaction the player would expect from the door!

That's all I am gonna write in this dusty journal for today.

Until next week :)

Concept Art : Behind the scenes

Hello people!

This is Kostas, reporting from Project AH (We really need to consider a name for our game to be honest!), progress is smoother than ever with both artists and programmers functioning at full capacity. Doors, cubes hunting us through narrow corridors, stealth inside wardrobes and the interactivity level is over 9000 !!!

Last week, we presented to you some sick concept art drawn by our Concept Artist and Art Director, Eliza Marinou.

This time, we will take you behind the scenes and let the whole blog post talk about itself in this great time-lapse video which shows exactly how Alma and Albert were made:

Until next time, were we will show you some sweet progress from the programming perspective!

Character Concept Art - The first two characters

Hello everyone!

It’s been two weeks since our last post and here we are with more concepts!

Although this time, we’re actually flexing our muscles even more, by presenting you with some of
the main characters taken right from our story!

So, let us share some insight on who/what you see, by beginning with Albert :

Albert - Full Body Concept Art

An engineer and physicist by study, having attended Eaton college in his younger years and King’s
College after that. His unquenchable passion for all things mechanical, as well as his unwavering
resolve concerning his experiments are the driving force behind this young genius.

Yet, a dark and heavy burden looms on this young man’s shoulders. A burden that remains to be
brought to light…


Introducing our second character, Alma:

Alma - Full Body Concept Art

What do you get when you cross a kind, poetic heart with the luck that August’s stars can bestow
upon a certain person?

The answer lies before you.

A kind-hearted girl, born to a rural family near Reading, the only daughter of her family - and the
only one to inherit the great secret arts that her family’s women possessed. The person whose love
is selfless - devoid of any notion of corruption. A pure-minded girl grown into the perfect kind of
woman that any man would desire to have by his side…

In the end, we are the masks that we choose to wear, are we not?

Doors, Stealth, AI and some Art

Hello!
How's everybody doing?

Project AH is on its' way to becoming even better, day by day!

At the moment, the door mechanics are being designed and coded into the game, as they have offered quite a challenge for the programming department. You see, it's not a matter of opening or just closing a door. You will have to calculate the position of the player, their direction, and whether they are looking the front or the back of it. All this included, we are working on creating an absolutely natural door-opening mechanic.

Once this is done, we will move on to implementing this mechanic on double doors and thereafter, on locker / wardrobe objects (That will be used as the main mean to actually use stealth in the game).

That would bring us closer to the AI of the monsters. But then again, that would require some monsters designed, and then some puzzles, and then, and then... It's a BLAST! Such projects require time to handle and be developed properly.

So we will keep you informed on how that goes! As you see there is much to be made, and the team is so excited about the development! It's like our little baby, growing up day by day!

For example, here is a sample baby monster concept:

BANG! Unity Event Retrospective & Teaser

Hello everyone!

Another Friday post is here, and boy has it been a full week!

Last week you witnessed firsthand what happens in the minds of the artists and designers, that partake in this endeavor to create a deeply disturbing and horrifying experience. This time, we shall take it to the next step, with some insight on our latest video teaser for Project AH.

For those who have missed it or didn't have a chance to show up, we are now officially revealing the very first video teaser of our game!!!

Here is the video:

So, how does the backstory merge with what you've seen?

"I have been roaming my own house for hours. They are nowhere to be seen. Either something is wrong - my mind, perhaps? - or they are all jesting, waiting to come out of a corner in playful bliss. I can hear her - my daughter - calling me, I can hear that toybox i gave her so many years ago... I was almost certain I saw her, I was convinced that she was the one that called out to me and warned me of the Shadow. Without her I would have perished, or worse. Yet, what still scars me to my very soul's core is what she said when I entered the cellar - "You are being sacrificed, Daddy." It was a calm, ethereal aspect of my little girl's voice. I would also swear that as she spoke, I could see the orbs decorating the twisted cellar pulsate and quake, with fires resembling the deepest parts of Hell. But, in the end, there is no point in thinking too much of it. It was just a disturbing dream..."

Back to our weekly schedule now!

Monday's event went smooth as many people got into the idea of horror game design and game development in general and paid some good attention and asked a lot of questions!

Attendance rate was extremely high and good, as the event was sold out at 300 tickets! At this point, I'll let the pictures talk for themselves:

The time was nigh. And they kept coming... and coming... and coming... until there was no spot left!

The event is about to start. Getting ready for a mind-blowing presentation.

Basic Fundamentals of Visual and Audio Design in Horror Games

Discussion on importance of Player connection and UX in Horror Games.

Creating your first horror dungeon in Unity3D

We loved the Q&A at the end, all you folks seemed to enjoy the event! And the only thing we can say is that there will be more in the future! So stay tuned, never miss anything new!

Aaaaand that's all for now, folks, see you next week!