Overland Newsletter — September 2016
Welcome to the September newsletter. It’s October! HERE’S A DOG:
Obligatory Marketing Thing: you can join Overland’s First Access program on itch.io today! As Adam Smith (RPS) notes, it’s definitely a work in progress, but the community has been having a pretty good time already. If you decide to join now don’t forget to share your thoughts in the private development community!
Into the Woods
The Woodlands is one of the earliest parts of Overland so it should be one of the least complicated. Currently it has the fewest enemies, the fewest items, and the most leeway for new players. Sounds easy, right? Well, since it’s so early in the game it bears a disproportionate amount of responsibility for keeping players engaged and for helping them learn and experiment exactly when they’re most likely to bounce off. Which gets gnarly. And, for a long time, the Woodlands didn’t even exist.
Fun fact: Overland wasn’t even a road trip game at first. But squad-based games usually have entry and exit points . The original mockup had a car, because I like dumpy hatchbacks, and because it made sense from a sort of apocalypse scenario. Eventually we started to get a sense that the car could be way more than just an exit tile, that it could move, that it could have inventory, that it could become almost a character of its own.
Out of this came the idea of having a roadmap, and putting strategic elements into that, and theming it around a cross-country road trip, and a little wink and nudge to Oregon Trail and so on. Out of that came a need for segmentation, for definition, for granularity. For zones or areas or game worlds or whatever. Out of that came research into the actual ecological biomes of the US, and the sort of colloquial biomes that we know from books and movies, and trying to figure out our scope and our budget. Originally I felt strongly that the game should start in a kind of Appalachia. In retrospect, I think this is partly because it reminds me of the midwest, where I grew up.
(For our international readers, what we call the midwest is located entirely in the eastern half of the United States. There are historical reasons for this but it’s mostly just confusing now. Sorry for being America, again)
Heather vetoed this Appalachia idea almost immediately. And rightly so — my ideas and references were way too far off-tone and off-palette from what we were planning for the rest of the game. Not all apocalypses are equal and so on. So we ended up changing it into a new area we called the suburbs, which exactly zero of us were actually happy with, but it was a good placeholder while we fleshed out other areas of the game that needed attention more.
Later, as we were approaching a very real milestone that would involve letting some copies of the game go up for sale, we began to prioritize some splash screens (we call them “vistas” internally) to help anchor players in the North America (which helps with a sense of progress and set a wider scene than the little tiled levels might communicate on their own, etc etc). Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), this led directly to a frustrating issue with our placeholder suburbs biome, because none of us liked it anyways, and spending a bunch of time making a big splash screen for a zone we didn’t like felt stupid to all of us.
This tension, though, is what led to us rediscovering the Woodlands, and how to make that region work for us. Heather found a photo of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic route through North Carolina, that has a bit of brutalism and Edward Hopper in real life, and made a great reference point for re-exploring this space as designers. Here’s the vista Heather produced for our First Access milestone back in April:
After this we took a break, while other aspects of design and production took priority during May and June, and because we weren’t 100% sure where to go from there anyways. Then Heather revived a sketch from last year when we started exploring last month’s big promo graphic:
This graphic, and the Maya scene for it, became the testing and development ground for the actual in-game Woodlands assets, which you can see below.
But wait, there’s more! The coolest part of this whole process was putting those new assets into the level generator actually produced new approaches to level generation that improved many other parts of the game. For example, we now have the ability to ensure that certain objects can appear near the road, or on the far edge of a level, or any of a dozen other simple restrictions. We can make street signs face traffic depending on which side of the street they’re on. We have a drastically more efficient pipeline for producing level terrain that can change color and road position with minimal meshes and textures based on gameplay data. All art-driven choices that at worst were gameplay-neutral and at best notably improved our scenarios, in addition to disproportionately strengthening the art direction for relatively little programming effort.
At least at Finji, this is the reality of making a thing. There’s no such thing as top-down or bottom-up design, really. There’s ideas that hopefully solve some problems, and more importantly, there’s just the on-going maintenance of relationships between our ideas, existing systems, art needs, UI constraints, and more. It’s messy and beautiful and I love it.
Night in the Woods
We’ve talked about this a bit before but Finji is a pretty small company. We have a lot of amazing collaborators, but ultimately we are a small team that just happens to collaborate with other small teams. Like a jellyfish. Or a coral reef! Wait coral reefs are gross. Jellyfish. What I’m trying to say is we’re trying to flesh out this crazy strategy game that you all seem to love as much as we do (oh my god thank you) AND ship a certain other wonderful thing called Night in the Woods at the same time.
Before I go too much further here I need to preface that the NITW team are the hardest-working game-makers we have ever worked with. It is pretty humbling to be involved and to witness their accomplishments first-hand. But NITW is also pretty colossal. So while we were very proud to bring you this new look at the Woodlands this month, our commitments to NITW’s upcoming release definitely affected our schedule. So far you all have been super understanding and supportive about this, but we still want you to know that we are very, very impatient to return to exploring the end of the world with you.
Making commercial indie games is also about a lot more than just sitting at a desk writing code or drawing pictures. Just in September, we took NITW to PAX West in Seattle, where it was repped in the juried PAX 10 selections, and prominently displayed in the Sony booth. We wrote the first draft of this newsletter in Austin TX, where NITW was playable on the official Sony kiosks during Fantastic Arcade. We also built a whole new real-time proc-gen game inside NITW. It’s called DEMONTOWER. That’s my fault, sorry! Not sorry haha. And we did all that in just four weeks! Here’s an inside look at our studio process:
So yeah, we’re staying busy (read: borderline delirious) to help bring this amazing thing to the world and we’re almost there. So thank you again for your patience! We have some big announcements this month, but in the meantime, well, you can count on Finji to bring you all the best in arboreal indie games.
Out of the Woods
If you found this update interesting and missed the July (E3 press) and August (status update) newsletters, they’re short and informative and you’ll probably dig ‘em. If you want a pupcar or Finji shirt we still have a few up in the official Finji Shop. We are working on our next round of merch and oh dang it’s gonna be good. We’ll also be dev-streaming quite a bit more starting this month, since we’re working on slightly more exciting features finally! Ok, time to get back to work on bug fixes and new features! Thanks for reading, and as usual you can follow Overland on twitter, facebook, tumblr, youtube, and twitch. You can also wishlist Overland on the Steam if you’re into that. Safe travels ❤
