#I’ve finally settled an artstyle for efficiency

[camping-with-monsters]

Was requested to draw a Politoed with a cowboy hat :)

[xenocorp-devblog-blog]

The Formidable Tale of Xenophever, Part 2

Yaaay the first day of production at last.

I was genuinely excited by the whole process of working for a year on my very own videogame concept with very nice working conditions and a team of people I really enjoyed. Genuinely terrified too. I was the coding spirit of the team, and that's a lot of responsibilities I wasn't sure I could handle on my own.

We had our own room shared with another working group, and now was the time to develop Xenophever for real.

(yeeeeee)

Our first challenge as a team was to prove our vision for Xenophever was not only interesting but also technically viable. The summer prototype I had built on Game Maker helped communication with our teachers, but one issue remained ; we saw the game camera as isometric, and some of the teachers were still doubtful. Nothing in Game Maker makes the process easy, so improvisation was key. Now I know there is a lot of clever math tricks to be done to convert distance into things and whatnot, but I had not taken a math class for years and never had the best time with this discipline. So my very un-spanish self ended up following a spanish tutorial so I could make the magic happen in the engine while the artists were learning to twist characters and settings to an isometric grid Game Maker did not technically took into account. Despite our various problems, we created the first version of the Bartender, built blocs and props, developed two different moving systems (arrow keys and point&click since we were not that sure) and finally got an approval on the camera matters.

(thanks spanish person, you probably saved Xenophever)

The next major difficulty to come in code was the actual AI. I had pulled together a solid first draft with the summer prototype, but the pathfinding system was to become more difficult given the sets of rule we had went for in the level design. Again, almost no math notion here. I had very difficult days plucking off my hair trying to find a solution.

In the animation department, Florian was leading raging battles against various solutions to cover the massive amount of animations we had planned for the game. Eventually he ended up settling for Spine -and that's the beginning of a beautiful tale I would never dare to explore on my own name, because he will probably touch the subject himself soon enough.

During this time Louis, fellow game designer and overall mastermind, scheduled what was to come for us for the whole year according to the deadlines the school demanded us to consider. Valentine, head artist, worked on designing the first aliens while we were implementing the animation system of the first species that covered the entire set of clients in this early stage.

Maxim, our environment and UI artist, was busy conceptualizing and implementing our first Structure, the Bar. Once in the engine, I could fiddle around with depth and integration. The production was starting nicely despite the technical problems we faced.

(my early desk, before it completely drowned under post-its)

So we started to feel homey, but something had yet to be build. I think the first time we actually worked as a team boils down to the concept and execution of the main menu. Not a single person had been left out of the process, and I think even today, the main menu is one of the prototype's strengths when it comes to its universe and hooking the player into the game. Then we decided to rent a photography studio for promotion -and fun-, and we ended up blasting off funk, retrowave and 90's tubes as we tried to get somewhat useable pictures of the crew. We had good fun together, it blew off steam from our personal issues with the project. Many things happened during this event, including (but not limited to) :

(if this doesn’t convince you we’re qualified to work on anything, I don’t know what will)

Afterward, it was all back to those problems with a fresh eye. I ended up getting some help from my mom that probably saved me from being stuck in a bug forever (thanks mooom), and Maxim faced his most resilient problem in the production ; the restroom. We weren't exactly sure how explicit we wanted to tackle certain subjects and how badly we were willing to get PEGI-ed, so Maxim's first designs were slightly tame. Not only he had to design toilets that were supposed to work with a great deal of anatomies (we were not certain about every alien design, but even then we knew it would be no fun if everybody used them the same way), but it had to fit in the octagonal space the level design allowed. After many attempts, Maxim settled for a living plant-monster thing feeding off organic decays, and lovingly named it "Dawyjozon". Flo and I then worked on the animation routine of the two aliens we had, and then I tried to figure out for WAY TOO LONG WHY EXACTLY THE CLIENTS KEPT THE TOILETS WITH THEM OUTSIDE OF THE RESTROOM AND- well. I figured it out eventually, but this bug was the regular thing to expect at each new animation update. I'd say I stopped finding it hilarious reasonably fast, but I'm pretty sure the rest of the team disagrees.

(Fate thou have forsaken me (again))

When we reached our first serious milestone in January, things accelerated fast. At this point artists were not late, we already had 3 of the 4 aliens planned in the final game, 4 of the 6 structures, only one mini game of the 3 we ended up having and... And a serious design problem. In the state it was, the game was not really fun nor challenging. The systems worked but loosing was extremely hard. No tactics nor strategy were required, the world felt a bit flat, and we fell into a lot of lecture and interface issues. The playtests results we gathered that day helped us focus on the big picture a bit more efficiently.

(ultimately we remained excessively purple)

After that day, things get blurry for me. We were close to the deadline our teachers had set that forbade us to include any more design tweaks. I had until then to bend the system from an alien-observer simulator to an actual game. Louis worked hard on this with me, crafting two systems next to the first one. We brought the drinks into the game with various effects -they were a huge game-changer-, the last species made its way into the prototype and Maxim, now finished with most of the level design, slaved over the interface until we had something viable to show. My whole life became a programming battlefield night and day, but eventually, during the beta session our school had planned on an E-sport bar, we were somewhat ready. (okay the game crashed twice) (at least no unexpected toilet showed up) (so there's that)

(thanks to the people who tried the game and gave us feedback!)

Things were still not over. Not only we were entering the dreaded stage of debugging and tweaking, pixel-perfect territory and other annoyingly precise tasks, but Louis and I started tackling the dialogue bits of the game. Good bits. I had fun. It still was a very hard week of work. Over 800 possible dialogues were written for each species and nature.

About that time I also needed to tackle everything in the sound department. Originally I had great plans for a very complex soundtrack and tons of spatially localized VFX to bring the nightclub to life, and of course I had to cut my expectations drastically. I focused mostly on the feedback and the bare minimum for the aliens to be distinct from each other. And as for the original soundtrack, I had been working on finding the right type of ambiance for the game since the past year, but nothing truly satisfied me and time was running low. I settled for the main theme from "Messing With The Wrong Tentacle" and a few other themes to build around, and ended up with a decent amount of music that covered the game from intro sequence to the various types of game over the player could tumble upon. The code had been hard, but I'd say music had been one of my greatest enemies during the production. Yet I am still satisfied with the work I've put into the soundtrack with the limitations I had (Logic 5.5 on PC for the dinosaurs that have any idea of which version I'm talking about). And the deadline don't wait for your changes of heart.

(f you’re french you might get a song stuck in the head forever by staring too long at this GIF)

We also had to come to term with some of our mistakes. In design, the very limited moveset of the Bartender was thrown away to allow the player more reactivity and freedom, and we had to admit the hybrid tablet/PC thing we were going for simply did not work that well on PC, that ended up being our only platform. It's not as smooth an experience to drag and drop things with a mouse than with a finger. Many overcomplicated layers of User Interface were left in, as it was a bit too late to refine now. Visual feedback was clearly not as strong as what it should have been, the NPC/NPC dialogue system was a bit off and glitchy, and the dynamic light system never ended up in the final prototype. Still, we had a pretty solid game. So solid, in fact, the engine had troubles handling it. I had many concerns as to potential memory leaks or infinite loops, and as an honest confession I never properly learned how to code, so I could have been making critical mistakes without even knowing. As it turned out, and despite all the flaws in my code, our integration method that saved countless time on my part was actually destroying the engine's capacity. The direct consequence of that implied an utter inability for the game to load and run on various PC configurations. We rattled our brains to disarm the disaster, but despite a week of hard work re-cutting every sprite and reworking the texture packs until they ended up into somewhat acceptable range, the game could not run properly on many configurations regardless of any identifiable pattern. In the end, we gave up. I don't think Game Maker is the best engine to for an artstyle such as ours and the visual ambition we had (and despite all the blood, sweat, tears and overall blast I had working with it -it actually gave us plenty of other advantages that I'm really grateful for). In the end, what mattered was bringing this prototype to our end of the year reception and making it run. We tried the installer on the local computers. It ran. We had to accept the situation, at least for a time.

We packed the final prototype a Friday. But technically they were not checked until next Monday. Which was good given I found out one last bug the Saturday that made me run under a raging storm with clearly not enough clothing to re-upload the corrected version in the school.

Never piss off the Deadline Gods.

And at last. The first version of Xenophever was completed.

Then we had a month.

During this month, several things happened. First off we had to prepare the game presentation in front of professional guests, we finished the trailer properly, and then the dreaded question of "and what next ?" started peering from our empty taskboards.

We have been questioning the possibility of pursuing the game for several months now, but June was the deciding time in which the team agreed on its future.

In the end, Maxim and Valentine wanted to pursue their path on their own, and the rest of the team wishes them the best of luck in this decision and many great and inspiring projects to work on. For the rest of us, well... It seemed like we were going to be stuck together for a bit longer. The final day came at last. We were back in the Final Spot again, same place in which we had our open betas. During the morning, professionals played our games and exchanged feedbacks (and we are forever grateful for those, they're incredibly useful in our current refont -but more on that later). Then we finally presented our postmortem in front of a compact crowd alongside our classmates and their projects Bloom, Rio 2050  and Arashi. The burning afternoon passed by with a glass of custom Xenophever cocktail the adorable staff prepared for the occasion, and we ended the journey the evening on a french beach and even more alcohol. That's a life I can get behind.

(and since this day, Louis became a table and lived very happily ever after)

So yep. Our first attempt at Xenophever was packed and done. I honestly could have hardly dreamed of better production conditions and a better team. Many thanks to ArtFX and our teachers for making this happen, many thanks to our classmates for running the race alongside us -especially to the Bloom team who bared with us daily through our various debates on insect reproduction, politics, toilet and strip tease reunions or animation reference research (Florian probably wishes he could unsee a thing or two), many thanks to our families, friends, and everybody that followed us on social medias at the time. And at last, thanks to the team. Valentine and Maxim have been formidable companions and will always have a special place in the heart of Xenocorp. Here's a link to their respective Artstation platforms in case you want to show them some love anyway, because these guys deserve it : Valentine : https://www.artstation.com/ardal Max : https://www.artstation.com/tortosambrosini And then... Then we took July off. I was exhausted beyond anything possible, and if we were to take the hazardous road of indie development... We'd need some strengths.

Tomorrow, I'll uncover the last part of our journey ; the aftermath, and what the hell we've been doing with all that. Thanks for the read. Wow. This post is really long.

See you tomorrow ! Raquel (and Xenocorp as a whole), out.