Gori Behind the scenes Episode: 1 From Concept to Level 01 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! =D

Victor here, from the Studio!

I'm gonna take over the Patreon blog for a while now =P so I hope you guys are ready! 

My plan is to do some sort of episodic Behind the thingz thing about our games mostly fokusing on GORI of course, but maybe also our previous titles if you people know something you wanna see like Creating levels for Apsulov etc. where I can show some really old work in progress stuff. 

I'm also thinking about letting everyone on the studio do some posts allowing everyone to show personal work things like William showing some personal music things, John some personal character stuff, Caroline some personal animation and 2D projects and me with some environment stuff / tech art things and maybe tutorial on some basic things for Unreal 4 =P. Just let me know if any of that is what you all wanna see on here or other ideas. 

I thinking how I'm gonna present this to you guys in the different tiers =/ I think this first one is gonna be for you all instantly, but after that I'm thinking this will be mostly a Knight and Nobles tier thing, maybe Knights get to see them a while before Nobles or something and like every five or ten posts also get sent to spawns so you all get to see something now and then xD. I hope this sounds fair for you all =P, mostly we want you guys who pay to feel like you guys get something back from us and that each tier feel they get something respecting what they pay. 

But without further ado let's get into Episode: 1 about the City Level things! (and ye I spell like a rake as we say in swedish xD so typos is my name)

The idea for the city came very very early on. For the few of you that saw and tried our concept thing on SGC a while ago know that already then that we had some kind of city blockout level to play at that point. It was a very natural chois of setting of course seeing how the base concept was Skateing, Sci-fi and Toys. Mixing these thoughts together we choose a cyberpunk esk type of setting with a grey world that serve as a kinda blank base for the toys to mostly spread their colorful and happy things in contrast to. We imagined it as city that is only brigthed up by a multi billion dollar Toy Company, like if google own the world but was toy company sort of way.  

                                                                        (Early Test Level)

Sadly I can't show you all our first like mood boards and stuff we made, cuse we photobashed em using pictures from alot of different games and art that we don't own so it don't feel right to show them for money =P. But imagine a picture of a cyberpunk city with toys and stuff everywhere xD. 

So thats where we started, a dark dystopian cyberpunk city raveged and conquered by toys.

After we showed the test thingy at SGC we went back happy to know this is what we wanted to make. So we started laying down the base for the first tutorial map. Starting out we did like we did for Apsulov that John draws a map and later I block it out. 

Above you can see the first draft maps John drew for me. Everything called like T12 is planned events that happen in game. And as you can see even now for you that have playd it a bit alot of things have changed xD but alot of the core themes are still there. 

We alweys try not to fall in love with anything and be very open to change anything for the better. It's a lesson we have with us even from Unforgiving when we realized that the first part of the game was too dull and long so we just deleted a bunch of walking forrest that we made for the better. And same thing here, especially now during development we change thing all the time from new tutorial segments to whole reworks for better gameplay. 

When I start blocking out a environment I alweys keep a pen and paper infront of me. So I can doodle ideas while I'm just putting out boxes and playtest. Above you can see some of my doodles and maybe you can see a little of how things later turned out. I never intend to give these to anyone else so they are mostly doodles for me to remember my own ideas for shapes and concepts.

Sadly I wanted to show you here some Ultra Early pictures of the first "intro" but i can't seem to find them at the time =/. If i find em ill update this post and let you all know! But for now the earliest stuff from the level I can show is the first fight arena. The area we now call the "grafitti area" xD. 

So yeah I hope you can see a bit of where and how a level starts xD. Initially I wanted to have a big fan in the middle that you could jump and fly around with, but for a first fight it kinda broke the simplicty of just getting to skate around on the ground and get your first taste of real combat so we removed it. 

You can also see here how we start very blocky without alot of 3D modules and stuff and add things as we go. We usaully alweys want to play a level before we actually try to make it look good, if we don't have any modules first. This is so the level can still be worked on by everyone like programming events and trying out fights even if the level is not graphically done.

For reference after testing and continous exploring on how we want the game to look it now looks like this:

And I'm sure this is subject to change again as we further understand how the game shuld look. As you all might hear we set things very loosly in favour of being able to start working early. So we develop the style as we go. The same thing happened in Apsulov, maybe i'll talk about that some day how we worked in more Viking on the Sci-fi at some point xD.

Here are some other screenshots I found of older work in progress areas.

So yeah xD I can't really find too much more to say. When I started writing this i realized how few pictures i actually have of Work in Progress stuff xD. I'm gonna try to take more pictures from now on so I can better document whats going on. And its more interesting for all of you to see that rather than me just writing a bit about it =P. Hard to convey how many iterations a environment go through before its done. 

And as alweys we change things all the time and we constantly try to make the game feel better, play better and be more fun so we usualy have to go back and change things so they better fit the current gameplay. But we will keep you all updated on that in the future both on here and Discord ofc. 

So for now I hope this first little bigger glimpse behind the scenes where intersting. And let me know in the comments if it's something I can do or make better xD this is my first real post so... I'm just freeriding this as I go and hope you all find it somewhat interesting.

Next time I plan for you to get a glimps into the creation of our main character Gori ;) I hope that sounds fun! 

Laterz Everyone! And Happy Midsummer! =D