Hey gamers!
Welcome to our first official blog post for Veil of Maia! Allow us a quick moment to give an introduction before we get to all the juicy stuff.
We are Brandon and Nikki, a husband and wife dev team dedicated to making awesome video games!
Nikki handles art and animations for EVERYTHING, from environment art to characters and enemies. She also edits our Youtube videos and is our website designer and social media manager.
Brandon handles all things geek code, writes the game story and assists with marketing and website design. We share the load of level design.
It’s been a looooong road to get to this point. In case you don’t know, we both went to College for and started out in Accounting.
Brandon worked as a full time financial analyst at a trucking company for a long time while Nikki stayed home to homeschool our two autistic kids and run a photography business.
In Brandon’s final year at the company, we were having severe troubles in our marriage, Nikki was struggling with addiction, we were both medicated to help us cope with mental health issues, we lost Brandon’s brother to suicide, we had house guests (supposed to be for a month, it ended up being 7) that brought a world of drama into our house, and COVID sprang up out of the blue.
This led to what I can only call a mid(ish)-life crisis on both our parts that made us decide to uproot everything and start our lives (and careers) over. This involved Brandon quitting his job, us selling our house and together starting Sasquatch B Studios. You could say this company was born in the eye of a storm…
However, I am SO pleased to report that we are doing better than ever! We have worked SO hard to repair our marriage (with great success!), we are medication-free, and are building our dream company. Nikki actually now volunteers to help people struggling with mental health issues, and Brandon is feeling passionate about his work for the first time since he was a kid!
But enough about us! I said I’d keep the intro brief, didn’t I?… (my bad) Well let’s get to the good stuff then!
It’s been an interesting process so far, with a great deal to learn every step of the way!
Game development is a funny thing, getting to the finish line seems to be about consistency, problem solving, and being good at making thousands of little micro-decisions. There are literally hundreds of ways you can do anything!
One early on question was, what game engine to use? Well Unity is my favorite (and only engine I have experience with) – it’s robust and has lots of documentation and answers online if I run into issues. Check for one decision made (whew!)
Early Days:
Another example…how do you handle the code for player movement? I did NOT want code that looked like this:
I’ve never made a commercial game before, but I’ve made a great deal of micro projects with many player abilities. And each and every time a new ability is created… EVERYTHING breaks and there’s a great deal of debugging involved because of the simplistic nature of how I programmed certain behaviors (ie. Move so long as any of your abilities are not in use).
I put in a great deal of thought in terms of how to deal with this, and apparently decided that the MOST complicated method I could find was the best one to tackle this:
A Hierarchical Finite State Machine:
This is NOT ours, this is an example I found here (by Debby Nirwan) to give you an idea of what this is. I didn’t do a diagram for Veil of Maia as I’m better when I’m just tinkering in the code.
Really, this method makes it extremely easy to transition from one player “state” to another.
But really, that’s just one of many examples of the kinds of decisions that need to be made… Another one was, art: how do we want to handle the animations for 2D characters?
They can be rigged with bones to be animated just like 3D models, or we can simply animate different layers within Unity itself, or you can use actual 3D models and make a 2.5D game, or you can do it all yourself and do it frame-by-frame.
We opted for frame-by-frame. And we’re SO glad we did!
The style is clean and simple, makes the character stand out on screen, and allows for FULL control.
We completed our prototype early on to ensure that our core ideas were fun and viable. This included:
– A Story-driven hero’s journey which is narrated
– Chase sequences where you are chased by an invulnerable entity, and the only focus is SPEED.
– An awesome combat system that includes Telekinesis.
Story
We love story driven games. Some of my best video game memories are playing Final Fantasy games, which are undeniably STRONGLY story driven games.
I also have memories of really REALLY needing to stop the story, save and quit because my parents were calling me upstairs and I COULDN’T because the early Final Fantasy games were mean that way.
So what we want is a story driven game that hits you right in the feels. The story and lore are almost like collectibles that you can ‘obtain’ by passing certain events or triggers. It’ll all get tucked away in a journal you can access in your inventory if you’re so inclined. That way, ALL story can be skipped or muted if that’s what you want.
I see no reason to force the story down your throat. It’s there. If you want to experience it, great! If you just want to slay some baddies or speedrun the game then great …because none of the story elements will interrupt gameplay (except for cutscenes, which will still be skippable.)
Apart from wanting to make video games, Brandon also wanted to be a writer when he was younger, so he’s very excited to crank out the best story he possibly can. We can’t wait to share it all with you! And we promise not to spoil it during these blog posts (or in our devlogs)
Chase Sequences
You will find one of these in EVERY area of the game. The current plan is to make them optional (though you will want to cross the threshold and pass this challenge… you’ll get a runestone for the BLESSING system if you manage to beat it! The blessing system makes Otu stronger and even more badass, so you will want to collect as many of these are possible.)
The idea behind these is speed and accuracy. There will be some enemies, and some damageable zones (spikes etc…) And your health will be cut WAY down no matter how much you’ve managed to accumulate! So you need to weave your way throughout the area, avoiding damage, yet also being as quick as possible to avoid getting caught by FEAR.
These will be (they’re too easy right now) tightly tuned sequences where you will be expected to have a solid understanding of Otu’s moveset in order to make it out to the other side.
Combat
Here’s the deal, this game is going to be CHALLENGING. So this needed to be kept in mind when designing Otu’s core moveset. He needs to be quick and his moves need to be as non-committed as possible in order to fairly allow you to react to enemies and bosses with quick telegraphs. For example, you can cancel OUT of a dash by jumping or attacking. There’s no acceleration in movement.
But there are many things to help you along the way! And you have the ability to heal at any time you choose …so long as you have a full Essence meter
Full essence meter (crystal at top left):
(a minimum of 2 health beads replenished at its weakest. Healing is upgradeable with the Blessing system)
Some other abilities in the game will require Essence however, so you’ll want to choose how you spend it carefully!
Telekinesis, however, does NOT require Essence, you merely have a cooldown between uses. This is a POWERFUL ability in the game that allows you to attack from a distance. The faster enemies are going when they impact, the more damage they receive! Smash one enemy into another to get a two-for-one!
But be careful not to smash them into yourself! This WILL damage you.
We’ve spent the last month implementing camera controls, environment assets, sound FX, basic enemy types, and currency (called ‘Lunos’…see below)
As you could probably tell…We also gave the art style a complete makeover from the early days!
Before:
After:
As you can imagine, it can take a bit of doing in order to find the right art style for a game. We are to this very day still nailing down our full “style” which would include all particles, post-processing and lighting elements we may or may not want to include. So many things need to come together to make a game into a cohesive and whole experience, and we’re trying to find a balance between making quick and decisive action, while also leaving ourselves enough wiggle room for creative experimentation. Too much rigidity doesn’t do any good, nor does too much flexibility. We’re still trying to find the middle ground between the two.
That being said, we’re super proud of the art that’s been pumped out, and we hope to truly deliver you a BEAUTIFUL experience to play with Veil of Maia.
Next thing that was heavily focused on was the Blessing system!
We’re very excited about this feature, because it’s what will really add replayability to the game and offer players a true wealth of choice in how they want to play the game.
As you unlock a new ability in the game, this will open a new ‘category’ within the blessing system. Each category will have multiple blessings that you can equip (so long as you have enough Runes to equip them.)
The better the blessing, the more runes it will cost. You can think of this system like a simple version of a skill tree, but without needing to invest heavily in one direction before unlocking the TRUE powerful abilities near the end.
It’s unclear whether we’ll allow the player to equip/unequip these blessings at any time, or if they need to do it in a quiet location away from combat. Playtesting will give us a better insight into what feels best for that question.
This system will essentially add a lot of variety to the game, and allow us to code in some more powerful modifiers that we really want to add (but would be too OP as a base ability.)
Some blessings will have more functionality for combat, some for exploration, some for gathering Lunos, plus some extra secrets we don’t want to spoil!
Where are we Headed?
Right now, the #1 priority is getting a 15-20 minute polished as hell demo complete with all of the following:
– Enough levels to showcase our core game loop
– A main menu
– A cut scene
– A (mini) boss fight
– A minimum of 5 enemy types
There’s a smorgasbord of crap that needs to happen to make this a reality! For starters there are like …infinity bugs it seems. They all need fixin’. We need to have a save and load system implemented. Graphics options. Hundreds of environment sprites need to be created. The current level of polish …is bad. That needs to happen too. The Blessing system, minimap, NPC vendor and inventory menu need to be created. We also need to do a game optimization pass, and create feedback forms for the people who play the demo and want to leave their feedback… whew!
Our self-imposed deadline to finish this is by July 13th. I won’t lie… it’s going to be tight. But as we said …we sold our house to fund this game studio, so we’re kind of on a timeline in terms of how much money we have, so we’re working as hard as we can to both make this game as awesome as possible, and to share it with as many people as we can find.
We cannot WAIT to share the completed demo with you all, where you can get a firsthand look at Otu traversing the deadly Witchwood Forest.
If you are interested in playing the demo, be sure to sign up so you’ll have it sent right to your inbox when it’s ready. (We’ll also send important updates, and little goodies here and there.)
And if you want more frequent updates on Veil of Maia’s progress, then subscribe to our Youtube channel. We post a new episode every other Friday with what we’ve worked on in great detail! You can check out the latest episode here!
Also, we have launched a new discord server! All are welcome, and we would love to see you guys join the Veil of Maia discord community.
Thank you SO much for your interest! Our next blog update will be in August 2022. Stay tuned, stay safe, stay awesome!
Cheers,
Brandon and Nikki
Sasquatch B Studios