Hello everyone! It's Sam, the marketing manager for Salty Slimeballs. We are officially back from a hiatus from posting. Our team has been working hard on making our game look it's best as we approach our release on #Steam! Speaking of #Steam, we are currently working on getting our page up and running for Four Course Dungeon. We are almost ready to send in our page for approval, which then you can #wishlist it! For now, here are some stills of our different levels in 4CD! Please be patient as we finish us our game and publish our Steam page. More posts to come! 😊
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Hello! Hello! My name is Kyle Hand, the Creative Director of Four Course Dungeon. I was selected to lead this team of 18 very talented students after Morgan DeMunck’s idea was chosen for one of the Workshop games this year. I knew right away that I wanted to be in a lead role on Four Course Dungeon so that I could be involved in every aspect of game development and learn the many skills needed to develop a game. I knew there would be challenges but was ready for the difficult times ahead. Our team was chosen using a draft style selection in which each set of leaders from both teams (Creative Director, Producer and Vision Holder) took turns choosing a student to be on their team. These selections were based solely on a “Brand Pitch” PowerPoint presentation in which they showcased their skills and preferences for what they would want to work on. I had only met one of the students prior to this so you can imagine the difficulty of crafting a cohesive team, out of 36 students, based solely on a few PowerPoint slides and an outline of what Four Course Dungeon was to become. Not only would they have to get along but we would solidify our roster for the next 8 months and be limited to whatever skillsets our team had. Long nights in Discord calls with Thomas and Morgan followed as we learned each other’s personalities while trying to pick the good ideas from the bad to set our team up for success. There was a lot of friction at first but after discussing the importance of coming together and leading this team as a unit, we were able to hear each other’s ideas and make a plan of action for Four Course Dungeon. This newfound momentum carried into the Blue-Sky meeting in which the team was finally all together in person to meet each other and share their ideas to help give further direction to our mighty game! Thomas, Morgan, and I spent a few more long nights deliberating and making final decisions for the long road ahead. Thomas Fletcher and I oversee the overall project management of this game and learned a lot through the first semester of Prototype sprints and Vertical Slice builds. Although it might sound obvious from the outside, it took time to realize that our team consisted of students who were either working or had other classwork alongside this massive project. Our team members, at maximum, were only able to give 15 hours a week to this project which caused us to over-scope what we thought was possible. Our team is skilled and if this was the only thing occupying their time, we could’ve pushed the boundaries more. It has been roughly 5 months since we began this project and we are running like a well oiled machine now. Any hiccups we had in the past are gone and I can confidently say, no mistakes were made in the draft. Each and every one of our team members brings a unique skill and outlook to the production of Four Course Dungeon. It would not be where it is without them. We are improving more and more every day. I could go on and on about the challenges we have overcome but there is more ahead of us as we work towards our Steam release of Four Course Dungeon. 18 students with jobs, classwork and busy lives working together to learn new, and refine old skills while creating a full game in 8 months is a tall order. But we look forward to serving up something special. Tune in next week for our Producer, Thomas, to talk about his experience being a lead for the first time! Kyle Hand, Creative Director Welcome, one and all, to the Salty Slimeball’s Code Post, starring Mitchel (that’s me!) as the Code Lead!
hold for applause Thank you! Thank you! It’s an honor to be writing this to you tonight! Alright, with a little bit of fun out of the way, I’ll cut to the chase. Code is not the most exciting topic for conversation for many people. I mean, how do you make programming exciting? Impossible, you say? I better hope not, or this won’t be much of a blog post. I will admit that Design, Story, and Art provide significantly more interesting and eye-catching descriptions and visuals for discussions. However, despite its daunting and confusing exterior, Code is the silent protagonist that makes the entire game development process possible. Where the design, story, and art act as the heart and soul of the operation, code is most certainly the brain. It’s how concept art and game documentation become a functioning fantasy cooking game show. It allows Paprika to not just be a collection of (gorgeous) textures, meshes, and animations but instead a conduit for the player to experience the game. Four Course Dungeon is programmed using Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprints visual scripting system. In other words, Blueprints are a visual version of the typical line-based system of programming that you see from hackers in television and films. And no. Slapping a keyboard does not allow you to hack into the Pentagon (but it can make a pretty good tweet). Despite visual scripting having inherently less flexibility than other programming processes, Blueprints provides a plethora of functions and nodes for programmers to code with to their heart’s content. Utilizing the power of Blueprints, I helped develop such systems as the combo system, weapon switching, charge, back-step dodge, and a status effect system, which you can see on our ‘Game Content’ tab here on our website! These systems have undergone consistent iteration, as we gain feedback from playtesting and fellow teammates. The programming process is a constant cycle of creation and iteration, similar to how an artist may sketch dozens of doodles before they create a FABULOUS skeleton. Regardless of how many times you rewrite a function or line of code for a game mechanic, there is always a way to make it feel better for the player to use. Of course, the player can always inherently tell if the knife attack is too slow or the jump feels a little floaty. That’s one reason that playtesting is such a holy grail for development. As a coder, I inherently don’t want to believe that something is wrong with my code, especially if I have spent dozens of hours polishing it. That’s why it is imperative to get other people to play it, so that we can swallow our pride (which is in surprisingly vast supply among coders within the industry). Our most recent playtest session unveiled some glaring holes in the design of our combat and movement. Originally, our Charge mechanic was supposed to act as our game’s primary source of movement around levels. Whenever it was used, the Charge would automatically move the player character in the direction the camera was facing, while also locking the player’s camera movement and rotation in order to force the player to have limited movement capabilities. Herein lies the obvious issue: our main source of movement limited the player’s movement. After realizing this, we overhauled the Charge concept into a more traditional sprint. No longer does the Charge reduce camera movement and player rotation. Gone was the automatic movement. Now, the Charge acts as a normal sprint, which actually makes the game feel significantly more user-friendly and fun to play. In regard to our combat, we realized from playtesting that players weren’t able to easily hit the enemies with their knives. Our game most certainly would not be much of a hack-and-slash if the player couldn’t hack nor slash the creatures. We knew right away that this needed revision. With the assistance of our Creative Director, Kyle Hand, we went to work revising our old combat system. Originally, we implemented collisions directly on the weapons themselves by adding box collisions to them. With this, the game could tell when the weapons would hit enemies and subsequently cause enemies to be damaged. However, this also meant that combat was determined by the player actually hitting the enemy with the weapon, which becomes significantly more difficult the smaller the weapon is. To remedy this, we scrapped the use of collisions on the weapons themselves and instead implemented capsule traces that run off of the attack animations. Capsule traces are temporary three-dimensional capsules that exist for only a few milliseconds that send a response to the game if an object overlaps them within the time that they exist. These capsule traces spawn at preset intervals during the animations, and allow significantly more leniency for triggering damage on enemies, as the weapons now have larger ranges for hit detection. With all of this said, user feedback is an absolute goldmine for bright ideas and necessary changes to existing game mechanics and characteristics. As players, you’ve gotta keep us coders humble by showing us our mistakes so we can improve upon them in the next update. Plus, nothing is worse than a coder with too much confidence. With that self burn out of the way, this concludes the very first Code Team post! Grab yourself some hot cocoa, embrace that chill in the air, and prepare for one sweet and savory May when Four Course Dungeon releases on Steam! Next week, we have our Producer, Thomas Fletcher, and Creative Director, Kyle Hand, discussing their own experiences as leadership in the game’s development. Mitchel Smith, Code Lead Howdy howdy howdy-- I'm Morgan, and I'm Four Course Dungeon's art lead and 2D designer. Four Course Dungeon was originally my idea, and I couldn't be happier about the direction it's been taking off in!
Piggybacking off Nate's post from last week, I can honestly say I've always had a strong vision about what kind of "feel" the visual style the game would have. My personal opinion is that nothing is worth pursuing if you don't like it yourself, so naturally I wanted to push for themes from things I was personally interested in; namely, anime and tabletop games. I would be lying if I said that the visual design of the game wasn't highly self-indulgent. The characters and world are meant to be highly fantastical-- I really wanted to have as few human characters as possible, hence Paprika's elfish background. Humans should feel like more of a token to the world, rather than the norm-- I felt like keeping this rule would really push for the whimsical vibes I wanted. When Nate gave me his concepts for all the wonderful characters that appear in Four Course Dungeon, I took his base ideas and went hog wild. So, Crayton Halseed is meant to be a flamboyant host? Alright, I'm going to go ahead and give him a heavy glam rock influence and make him a lich while I'm at it, why not? The idea of a skeleton hosting a cooking show is hilarious, after all. Jordan Hamsey is our knock-off Gordan Ramsey? Honestly, I felt like making him an orc was a bit too easy, so I wanted to go off the walls and make him a cooler Gordan Ramsey who frequents Hot Topic (Gordon, sir, if you're reading this, I think you're the epitome of cool and I mean no offense, I love you). I think Nate and I have a real synergy when it comes to him dreaming up the characters and me giving them a face-- he has incredible ideas always coming in with each one better than the last! Part of me is crushed I must keep myself from spoiling the whole cast, because they're all just so great and one of my favorite parts of the game. I just can't wait to share them all with you! See you in the next post, gamers! ❤️ Morgan DeMunck Hellooo! This is Nate from the Narrative department of Salty Slimeballs, here to talk about the narrative and worldbuilding of Four Course Dungeon! Now that you know what Four Course Dungeon is, from our previous post, I can tell you more about how we came up with the story for our game. We took Morgan’s ideas for the game and went wild with it, creating characters that could fill up this vibrant world. My first few tasks here at Salty Slimeballs were to flesh out some of the characters the player will meet throughout the game. To me, the characters in Four Course Dungeon are a love letter to competitive cooking shows and video games in one strange cast. Each character has their own unique backstory and will react differently to how the game progresses. Some will root for Paprika; others will try to trash talk Paprika and distract her while she’s cooking. I could talk about each of the characters and the inspiration behind them all day, but I’ll talk about the one that makes sense first, since the inspiration is obvious. His name is Jordan Hamsey! Jordan is the judge that you love to watch on TV, blonde haired and (slightly British) bold voice in all. His dialogue ends up being the one we have the most fun writing, because he can be really off the walls and still make sense. I mean, he’s Jordan Hamsey after all. Duh. Next we have Crayton Halseed! For those big brother fans you might recognize the inspiration. Our majestic host came to us out of necessity for a loveable host that can bring the player into the world. To describe him in one word, I would use FABULOUS (all caps are necessary). After we had the characters in place, the script came naturally. We knew we wanted to follow a cooking game show format, with our own unique twist. We want to add funny quips for the other contestants while Paprika is cooking, adding that depth and personality to these characters you aren’t going to play or see as much. You have the usual, contestants going against each other and judges judging, but we want to add different elements that make us unparalleled. We hope you fall in love with our characters just like we have! That’s all for now, thanks for taking the time to read this post, we’re so excited to share what we have with you all and get you excited for when the game is released on Steam! Next week our art team will discuss their ideas and how they thought of these amazing character and environment designs! Nate, Narrative Lead/UI Designer/Marketing Assistant Hey there everyone! This is Sam, the Marketing Manager of Salty Slimeballs and I'm here to talk about our game and the team surrounding it. To preface this, we are in a program at the University of Central Florida (UCF) for our Game Design degree and our final project, also known as a Capstone, is to create a game with a team of students. We are currently in our second semester and four months away from publishing our game onto Steam. For our class, Game Design Workshop, the class was split down the middle into two groups working on two different games. Salty Slimeballs and Four Course Dungeon were birthed from the mind of Morgan DeMunck, our Art Leader and Vision Holder. She came up with our game, Four Course Dungeon, 4CD for short. So... what is Four Course Dungeon? Four Course Dungeon is a game about serving up conquered creatures and scavenging ingredients in a fantasy dungeon to impress judges and become the Legendary Dragon Chef! The premise of our game is to fight monsters, collect the ingredients they drop and cook a dish from your recipe book with them. I categorize our game as a comedy based Monster Hunter/Overcooked hybrid with a colorful cast of characters added into the mix! With all that being said... I would like to introduce the main character of 4CD, Paprika! Paprika is a spunky and ambitious optimist who is obsessed with cooking and living up to her family's legacy. Paprika's spirit and liveliness will surely be a breath of fresh air in the world of gaming. I hope this first blog post explaining our past, present and future helps everyone understand who we are and what is coming up soon for you to see!
Thank you for reading, come back next week for an inside look into the making of our script! Sam, Marketing Manager/UI Designer/Narrative Assistant |
WritersFor our blog, we will have different writers for our blog posts. They will consist of our art team, design team and code team! They will talk about different problems and successes they had during the week. Archives
April 2022
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