Here you can find the newest updates, Work in progress shares and big sheep ramming gifs
HIRT Steampage + new trailer reveal
Hey fellow shepherd-warriors and devlog readers :D! We are apologizing for the lack of updates on this blog recently, but our team has needed the time for some pretty crazy developments aside from working on the game itself. After hours of recording footage, searching our movie database and selecting the finest shots and after nights of matching sheep hits on the beat of the amazing soundtrack by Christoph Scherbaum, the new HIRT trailer finally has made its debut on Youtube! We also owe a massive thank you to Dominic Sutter who helped us a lot with his rich knowledge of good cuts and movie sequencing.
And because we know we needed to solidify our game’s existence a bit, we also set up a Steam page for it! So finally, people who are eager to play HIRT can go ahead and wishlist it on the online store site. By wishlisting it, you can help us get awareness for our strange brawler powered by wooly forces. Multiplayer games do depend strongly on a community and we are firm believers of word of mouth, so if you know somebody who would love to fight you with sheep and dogs, do not hesitate to share all of the above with them :)!
About the release date: We are aware that is not a very helpful information, but to ensure HIRT is in a state that we are happy with when we first go into Early Access with it, we have to keep it vague right now. We might change it to something more concrete in the future though.
We are also very pleased to announce that HIRT is going to be featured on the game news site https://jackofallcontrollers.com. It is a great honor and we cannot wait to share the featuring with you all.
HIRT Art Update – Arches and Pillars
Hi fellow shepherds on the search for glory! Welcome to another HIRT Art Update!
After starting the day hunting a seldom occurring bug, we returned to one of our current focus topics: Making the levels and environments of HIRT more polished and “believable”. For this, we are currently building various assets, so we can build new maps quicker and experiment more with the level design and placement of props.
Destroying some arches
We started out by blocking out the simple shapes and correctly UV unwrapping the first arch and pillar. Afterwards, versions of the asset were created by duplicating the first object. We used the bisect tool in blender to make the arches and pillars seem worn down. This method easily helps you created chopped off corners or entire missing pieces. As we want the HIRT maps to emulate ruins of church-like constructions, making the assets seem destroyed was really important in the process. By creating several versions of the “same” asset, we can assure that different use cases are taken care of and the same piece can be used over one map without creating repetitive patterns.
Special UV-maps
All the different versions of the arches and pillars were UV-unwrapped in a way that the meshes can share one UV space. This is important, because we can use one material for all the assets on a HIRT map, which reduces the performance impact. Furthermore, this also helps to be quicker in designing the looks of a map, because color schemes and other shader settings do not need to be adapted all over the place, but on one single material.
High Poly, Low Poly and Baking
The next step for this part of the project is to create High Polygon Count versions of the assets. Those detailed meshes are going to provide normal information for the Low Poly in-game versions, which we more or less modeled today. By baking the normal information of the High Poly versions on to a normal map, these details can be integrated into our game and fed into our very own shader. We are surely gonna write another HIRT Art Update on this process once we will have successfully finished it.
Do you have a question about our process or feel like chatting with the devs of HIRT? Come say hi on our discord!
Pre- and Post Hero Fest 2019
Hey fellow martial herders!
More than a week ago Togglesword Games attended the Hero Fest 2019 in Bern, Switzerland. We had the chance to exhibit HIRT in the Indie Game Arena they had set up and we also gave talk about the systemic gameplay approach we follow in order to design HIRT. Furthermore, we were invited to have a „couch-talk“ with fellow multiplayer devs on the stage, where the other podium attendees played our sheep brawler and we chatted about the game.
The time in the Indie Game Arena proved to be super valuable to us, as we made recent changes to HIRT. During the three days of the Hero Fest, we could observe a lot of new, fresh players and how they played our game and what the new features (below) brought to the gameplay. We also had some experienced sheep brawler players come by, who knew us from earlier exhibitions all around Switzerland (like the Fantasy Basel, Zurich Game Show and the Geek Days in Zofingen). Another group of four players helped us track down a specific bug and were able to show us how to reproduce said error, which is extremly valuable to us developers.
For the Hero Fest 2019, we fixed some smaller things in HIRT (see previous post) but we also created some new sheep attack behaviours. Before, a sheep tossed by a shepherd would always attack the player closest to its position. This is still the case, but the older versions of HIRT left no chance to the victim shepherd. As the sheep would constantly aim towards the doomed player, there was no chance of escaping the hit. Now, the ability of the animal of aiming towards the player is limited and as soon as it is ramming forward, players can out-run and jump over the impending attack.
Moreover, we also created a new start screen with better-upped looks for our HIRT game. The new looks consist of more accurately selected colors and a finer grade of detail in the environments, to achieve a more polished overall aesthetic.
Fixes and minor changes
Hello world! Today, a lot of small changes were made to the HIRT game to tackle some of the issues the game had in the past. As we are getting closer to our next exhibition, the Herofest in Bern, some fixes for minor bugs and some adaptions for the usability have demanded implementation:
- We removed an unlucky and unintended way of dying. A sheep carried by a player could fall on his head and kill him if he would turn into a sheep while standing still. Now the sheep gets dropped as it should and proceeds to being angry at the player.
- We added a first draft of controller stick support in the UI. Players can now switch tournament modes and round counts with the joystick, not just with the D-Pad alone.
- Player sheep who are ramming and lose their wool (-> become human) now definitely stop the ramming and lose the ability to kill another player. There was a loophole in the code before, now this is fixed. Players exiting the ramming still move forward though, so it can still be used as a means of transportation over the map, wooo
- Sheep caught by players while ramming now display the right animation of being held
- Sheep caught by players after they rammed are carried with the right offset now. Before there was an issue with this.
- The ramming power UI displays now the right amount of power even after the player has used a different weapon. There used to be a bug which did not allow to display this in a reliable manner.
- We made the death and hit confirm UI font larger to ensure readability.
- The mighty windhorn now blows off the hats of shepherds if you hit the poor fellas with it. Still no damage effect, just a naked head.
- Last week, we also invested some time into the looks of our sheep brawler. We created high detail models of some environment pieces (rocks, walls) and the prepared those to be fit for the game by baking normal maps and making low-res model versions of it.
A gif duet for today
Some gifs that we made recently from various gameplay videos / mechanics in our game. Above you can see a dog being deployed in order to create a small stampede (it ends up crushing the poor shepherd though). The second gif is showing off some of the other fight mechanics which create frantic and intense gameplay, like making sheep angry and the mighty air horn, which blasts of wool of the animals in the way. (It also forces hidden players to come back to their human form, this can be used to stop ramming attacks).
Potential new Mapstyle – Turntable
Currently we are experimenting with a new, more polished approach to the visuals in our game HIRT with a potential new map style. However, mostly the maps are a focus right now. This is an out of engine rendered mesh we made to experiment with a new, more natural model style.
We created the rock geometry using a high poly subdivided mesh and then displacing it with the help of a displacement modifier. Afterwards, the mesh was downsampled in its poly count to make it ready for a game engine surrounding.
