[Rasetsu [Men]]

Tout les vendredis, les Devs publient un petit billet concernant un aspect du développement du jeu, donc avec un peu de retard je me suis décidé à les compiler ici.

Dev-Diary #1: Dress-Up!

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Hi! This is Tom – you might know me from one of the dev Q&A sessions. In our first installment of our dev blog I’m going to give you a couple of insights into how our technical item system works for the long awaited character customisation. We always knew that creating and customising your Shadowrunner is the big thing, but the details were vague up to a few weeks ago. As with all systems that we want to do the deciding factor is effort – can we implement the system initially, and can we support it with enough content in the long run?

The slimmed-down version we were looking at was having a character and adding upper and lower body clothing or armor, and giving him or her a weapon. This would give you some degree of customisation, and keep the system nice and manageable. However since our technical art department has made great progress, we’ve decided to step it up a bit. There will be more layers and items that can be combined, including a system that can adapt items depending on other items. For example, all of our pants (or whatever else your character can wear on his or her legs) have been made aware of the length of the boots you are wearing. If you wear higher boots, the pants get cropped accordingly so that you see the boots and there are no ugly clipping issues. A similar system is in place for gloves and upper body wear.

In terms of effort, this is definitely one of the largest chunks we’ve taken on so far, and it will be a long road ahead until you can see it in its final state. We’re going for a preview version though, so you should be able to look at it in the nearer future and give us your feedback!

Dev-Diary #2: Tuning the AI

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Welcome to our 2nd Dev-Diary. This time Sepp, one of our Game Designers, talks about how the AI in our game makes its decisions.

“Organ Farm”, just after our team has cleaned out a hallway full of gangers. The next door opens and who comes running? Our new not-quite-buddy, Bert. One of my jobs on the team is to make sure Bert the ganger behaves somewhat believable. So let’s start with what we think is “believable” with a guy like Bert:

• Bert is carrying a ranged weapon: no need to get up close and cuddly
• Bert doesn’t like getting shot: let’s make him prefer positions that give him cover
• Bert likes shooting runners: he prefers positions with a fair chance of hitting one
  

So how do we make Bert pick a spot to run to? First, we find out where he could run to at all, then we try to find out how desirable he considers each of these spots to be. Take a look at how Bert perceived the perilousness of all the positions he could have run to:

See how the closer he could have run up to Takshak the danger-level gets ever worse? Take a closer look at the corners just at the end of the hallway – a lot less scary. And all those zeroes? No shooting through walls here, no siree!

Conversely, take a look at how Bert perceives his chances at getting in a shot:


No shooting through walls again, obviously. His chances would improve in the case of him walking out of cover, inching ever closer to Takshak. But then, all of a sudden, they’re slim again – sprinting instead of walking would leave Bert without action-points to get off a shot – not quite that desirable anymore.
What we have here is a conflict of interests: Bert would quite like to step out into the corridor, closer to Takshak, but then, looking at his assessment of threat, he also would not like to do that at all. Two souls alas!

We resolve this issue by weighing Bert’s options: daredevil that he is, he values chances-to-perforate highest, chances-to-be-perforated a little less (“Just a scratch!”) , being-up-close somewhere in the middle … you see where I’m coming from.

In the end, plenty of considerations and some number-munching later, we end up with something like this:


The last thing we do is add some spice. Would we want Bert to always pick the same spot? Of course not. Bert’s supposed to be just a little bit erratic, just you and me. What we did is that we make Bert strongly prefer the very best spot to run to, but every once in a while we’ll have him run somewhere just a little bit less optimal.

Voilà, there you have it: Bert’s brain in a nutshell.

Dev-Diary #3: Anatomy of a fireball

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Hoi Chummers!

Its Friday again and that means we’re back with another Dev-Diary! This time our Technical Artist Riccardo is talking about a very hot topic – the anatomy of a fireball!

Hi, in today’s Dev-Diary I will be telling you a bit about what goes into making one of our Mage’s most iconic effects, namely the fireball! This handy skill can be used in all kinds of different situations. Just point it in the general direction of things that you feel are in need of a good burning and shoot. Simple, right? At a closer look however the fireball actually consists of many different parts that all work together to create the impression of a deadly little ball of mayhem. But before I get into that, let’s take a look at the humble beginnings of what finally became known as the “Spark” spell in the game.

Many effects will start out with a simple placeholder. This one was made by one of our programmers when they were first implementing the visual effects system – an example of what is known among game developers as “programmer art”. It might not look pretty, but it got the job done in conveying what the fireball would do later on.

When coming up with the actual design, it was important to keep it modular. Therefore the fireball is split into three individual parts: casting the ball in front of the mages hand, the projectile that moves from A to B and finally the impact on the ground. This makes it a lot easier in case we come up with some variations in the future. Want to have a skill that shoots fireballs in all directions or a projectile that travels in an arc instead of a straight line? I could easily achieve a completely different look by simply replacing or duplicating one of the parts and keeping the rest.

That’s the big picture, but we can split it up even further. Here are some of the elements that really make the explosion feel like an explosion:

• A Big Ball of Fire (naturally) – This is the most visible part of the effect and defines the overall look and feel of the explosion.
• Sparks – If you look closely the big explosion is followed by some smaller, fiery sparks that are affected by gravity. This gives the impression of the fireball really tearing into the environment and doing some damage!
• Smoke Trail – Of course where there is fire there also needs to be smoke. This makes the effect more realistic and gives the player a nice aftertaste of what just happened.
• Charred Ground – Similarly to the smoke, the the ground texture really enhances the feeling of looking at something that has a lasting effect on it’s surroundings.
• A Source of Light – No fire would be complete without emitting some light. Therefore fireballs actually light up walls and characters, looking especially nice on darker levels.
• Lens Flare – Some might say that lens flares a little on the kitschy side, but that hasn’t stopped us so far! Ours are inspired by the classic Sci-Fi look, the “anamorphic lens flare”. It looks great on a fast moving projectile and certainly helps in getting the player’s attention.
  

Hopefully I was able to give you a bit more insight into how the fireballs work in Shadowrun Online!

Dev-Diary #4: Spray it, don’t say it.

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Hi, I’m West,

I am a Devlog virgin. So if things start to get a little awkward soon, you’ll know why.

My tasks are a mix of Art direction and Concept art. Most of my time is spent jumping from one task to another, like a mechanic with too many cars in his garage and a bad case of ADD. A single day can consist of texture adjustments, environment overpainting, character designs, logo and prop design. Consistently different tasks keeps things interesting. In this Devlog I will be discussing one of these tasks.

Recently we had a meeting, and in that meeting we decided that we needed to have a meeting about the current state of the environments. We discussed what should be fixed on the existing environments, as well as which environments should be made next. The talking stick was passed around the tribe and the choice was made: “We need a nice gritty exterior“. So now we are in the middle of designing this environment, its mood and the assets that will populate it. Because we are trying to involved the community whenever possible, or maybe because my general work ethic has always been, “how can I achieve more while doing less”, I thought, why not open this task to somebody else. Somebody like you. Stupidly, I suggested this idea to the team, and not only did they like it, they made it one of my tasks. Hence, I am writing my first ever Devlog, and addressing the masses.

And so it has come to pass, that anybody from the Shadowrun community will have the chance to graffiti bomb the Shadowrun environments with their art. Well I say, “Anybody” what I really mean is, anybody can submit their art and we will pick the ones we want to use. Unaccepted entries will be loaded on to a USB stick, burnt to a crisp then sent to the bottom of the Marianas trench.
Below is listed a few requirements for all Chummers to adhere to, should they wish us to consider their entry.

1. Entries must be original artwork.
2. Graffiti art and bombing will be chosen over tagging and scribbles.
3. Rude and lewd is fine, but might have less chance of making it in to the game.
   

Format guidelines:

1. The best format to submit would be a PSD or PNG with a transparent background. Jpg, photos and scanned work is okay too, just be aware that we would then need to cut the artwork out of the image to use it, and this might affect some of the edge work.
2. The image size should be about 1000pixels height, width.
3. Try to keep the file size under 500kb.
   

Please send your contributions and questions to graffiti@cliffhanger-productions.com. The deadline for this event is July the 29th,2014. And remember, this is all happening in the Shadowrun universe, you are not bound by real world conventions.

That’s me for now. Maybe next time I will actually talk about the art. Maybe.

Cheers
West

Dev-Diary #5: The sound of silence

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One of the things most of you have liked so far is the fact that our characters have voices. Despite fully voiced characters being a major headache for any dev team we felt that it would give much more atmosphere and life to the world we hope to create.

The system we implemented for the first-look alpha (and that you have seen so far) is mission based, but doesn’t know anything about specific characters. That means that if someone does something within a mission, which causes a text to be triggered the person who caused this is picked, and gets the first line.
For that to work, every character has to have every line of dialogue, and they all need to fit together. For the first mission (where we know that only Takshak and Payday can be present) the exchange after the first door is opened looks like this:

So when Takshak opens the door, the dialogue starts at index 3, and if Payday opens the door it starts at index 6. This is fairly easy to handle as long as there aren’t too many characters involved, but it gets messy once you have more than three possible participants. It’s also quite maintenance-intensive – as you might have noticed we need to re-record every time something changes within a mission, which is why we’re doing the recordings quick and dirty, rather than having to live with texts that are out of date for an extended period of time.

Since the expiration date of fixed characters per mission is already visible on the horizon, there will be some major extensions to the voice system, which we’ve dubbed TOURETTE by the way.

First there will be more voices. Many more, since we expect you to want a broad selection for the characters you create. This means that we can’t continue writing texts the way we have now, but that all replies will be automatically assembled to fit the situation – like getting shot at, seeing an Aztech mage, running out of ammo and so on.

Second, we’ll try to include enemies into the system – that means that whenever a player controlled character says something, an enemy might reply and vice versa. Expect a lot of swearing.

As usual we can’t say exactly when you’ll be able to see this, it’s even more hassle in this case since after we’ve implemented the system we need to thoroughly test it with text only, and once it’s reasonably stable we’ll hit the recording booth and add voices. The big downside to this is that we can’t run both system in parallel once playable characters are being implemented, so there might be a period of about one update where everything falls silent.
BUT since the first version of player created characters is happening soon, it won’t be more than a couple of weeks after that that you’ll be able to listen to the all new voices in the all new voice system!

Stay tuned and keep listening, this is radio Free Boston!

Dev-Diary #6: I Dream of Excel

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Not all people working at a game company get to do the creative stuff, be it as a designer, programmer or artist. Some have to make sure that everything in the background is running smoothly – sometimes with strange side effects. Want to know more? Then read on!

Hi there! Most of you who read this will probably know me from the forums or as the guy sometimes visible in the Q&A-Vids, however just to be certain let me introduce myself: I’m Florian AKA Soundrel, one of those guys who make sure you’re kept in the loop about what’s going on here at Cliffhanger (among other tasks). Today I will not tell you what the devs are planning or about a new, upcoming feature however. I will tell you the tale of why my dreams lately have been plagued by spreadsheets.

As some of you already know, a lot of our backers (but not all, so please don’t panic if you didn’t get an invitation) received the invitation to a survey during the last two months, asking them to confirm their name in the credits. Yes, that was my doing, as ever since Liz/Merkerrinja took her maternity leave, I am also the one who is responsible for all things that are related to our backers. For those who got this survey it should have meant just a few clicks in the game, quite a bit of watching the credits scroll (which, as the list is rather long, could take quite a long time if your name was near the end of the list, as some of you pointed out) to confirm your name (which was not done to spite you, as some seem to have thought, but to actually make sure there weren’t any problems in converting special characters or Uppercase/lowercase issues) and then to tell us either “yes, the name is correct”, “no, use this nick instead”. If you chose the latter one, you could specify a new name. Also you were asked to give us your shipping address. Sounds like something that can be processed easily enough on our end? Yes, so I thought too.

Once the survey closed I experienced something I would consider a spreadsheet nightmare though. Imagine having four excel sheets opened simultaneously to make certain that every change happens to the correct customer and is changed in all required spots, checking back occasionally when something doesn’t add up using other tools, even more sheets and the helpful hands of colleagues. Result: What I expected to be a task that could be automated very well and wouldn’t take up too much of my time turned out into over week with very little work Excel could do for me and a lot of stuff I had to do myself. That doesn’t mean that the whole timeframe was filled with nothing but credit names, but I spent a lot more time with Excel than I thought I would – in fact so much that even when I was sleeping, I was haunted by credits, addresses and spreadsheets. Who was it again who told me “oh, great, you’re working at a game developer. You must be playing all the time”?

But I’m not here to complain and thus will end this story on a happy note: All those who answered their survey and asked to have their credits changed should see the results already in the current version of Shadowrun Online. And when you look at them, spare a thought about me doing all the updating. Just to make me smile.

Dev-Diary #7: Thank you!

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You might have heard some developers say you shouldn’t get too close to your prospective players while you’re working on a game as this might taint your vision. Others will tell you that working with your community provides a very unique experience and opportunity. As always the truth might be somewhere in-between, but ever since we started this journey to make Shadowrun Online, we were leaning towards the latter side. The last weeks proved to us that this was the right choice. Case in point? Your Graffiti.

Most of you will recall that three weeks ago our Lead Artist West asked you to send your graffiti work to us so we can include it in one of our upcoming environments. As we had only limited experience with asking our community to contribute to our development with artwork, we didn’t know what to expect. How good would the artwork be? Would we end with an empty mailbox or get flooded with messages? But we all agreed it was something we wanted to try – and so we did.

As the deadline for submissions has already passed (which doesn’t mean we might not be able to squeeze in a few fresh ones eventually, so if you wanted to submit your art, but couldn’t make it, you can still try – no promises though!) we can now say that this test turned out great. We have just started getting a closer look at your graffiti, so we can’t say yet which of them will end up in Shadowrun Online, but from just skimming through we can tell you already that we were impressed by the quality and the dedication of our community. So while we here at Cliffhanger are working on the finishing touches of the next update (remember: August 7th!) and already working on the next one, let us take this moment to say “Thank You” for sending in your graffiti and going down this development road with us. Here’s to our great community!

[Rasetsu [Men]]

Dev-Diary #8: Making a pair of pants

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Most of you will already know that we released a new update August 7th, bringing both an early version of Coop and the first iteration of Character Customization, which allows you to create your own avatar and dress him to your likes. It seems many of you have already taken a liking to find a cool, crazy or even gender-bending outfit, so it’s only fitting that in today’s dev-diary Stefan, who worked (and still works) on the various pieces of clothing, talks about what it takes to make a pair of pants.

Hi there! In today’s Dev-Diary we will take a closer look at the Character Customization and the effort we put into it.

Let’s start off with a single item – like this pair of pants.

Nothing out of the ordinary? Well, take this into account: We currently have three different types of footwear (shoes, boots, high boots) that should all go with these pants! This means we need to have three different versions of this article of clothing in the game, like this:

Now that that’s taken care of we’re still not done though: After all we would also like to put those pants on every character regardless of race and gender (yes, you can dress your male ork in a mini skirt and high boots). At the moment there are two metatypes and two genders in the game – which leaves us with a total of twelve pairs.

But of course we want to dress our characters in a little more than just pants (I suspect some of you want to dress their character in everything BUT pants). This means that we need to have a ton of other items which you can put into one of the following clothing slots and might interact with other items.

• Head (e.g. beards, hair, sunglasses, helmets or a combination!)
• Upper Body (e.g. tattoos, body paint, shirts)
• Jacket (e.g. jackets, vests)
• Hands (e.g. gloves, armguards)
• Lower Body (e.g. tights, underwear)
• Legs (e.g. skirts, pants)
• Feet (e.g. boots, sandals, shoes)
  

Combining all of these in a tasteful manner you might end up with a classy dame like the one below.

I hope this gives you a little insight into what it takes to create a pair of pants for Shadowrun Online.

[Rasetsu [Men]]

Dev-Diary #09: Convention season!

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It’s that time of the year again, Chummers: As summer starts to draw to a close (at least in some countries, Austria alas included), everywhere conventions try to attract the big crowds. And we Cliffhanger People are right among them at two special events.

On the one hand, our Lead Designer Tom joined our friends at Catalyst at their booth at Gen Con. For those who don’t know this event, here’s the short summary: It’s a long running, big tabletop-game convention, originally established by Gary Gygax, one of the fathers of Dungeon & Dragons, and is now held in Indianapolis, Indiana. On the other hand, Paul and Jan, together with Ærena-Designer Michael and Product Manager Jonathan headed to gamescom, the biggest computer gaming convention in Europe, held in Cologne, Germany. We have a spot there at the Indie Megabooth, so if you are there, drop by and say hello!

For us these events mean a lot of work, prepping posters, special builds of the game (you can of course play Shadowrun Online at the booth, though we had to make certain this special version would work without internet connection, which required some adjustments) and of course a lot of planning. But it is worth it, as all this work allows us not only to introduce new people to our games, but also to meet you, our Customers, in the real world, answering your questions and getting to know you better. And, to be honest, both are also really cool experiences.

So if you’re reading this and near one of the events, why don’t you just drop by? Both conventions are open to the public till August 17th. See you there!

[Rasetsu [Men]]

Dev-Diary #10: Convention Season (Part 2)

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Hoi Chummers! Those of you who follow us on Twitter, Facebook and/or Google+ may have heard a lot about our ventures to Cologne, Indianapolis and Boston this week. But those who haven’t – or can’t get enough – here’s our follow up to last week’s diary and our tales of convention season.

Let’s start with gamescom this time. We were part of the Indie Megabooth there and staffed our small cubicle with Jan, Paul (one of our level designers) as well as Michael and Jonathan from the Ærena team. For those of you who couldn’t join us there, we had two PCs set up there so you could play coop together, PvP against each other and of course the solo missions. From the feedback we got, most enjoined their time with Shadowrun Online, and of course we diligently recorded what you liked or disliked so we can evaluate it internally and improve the game further. We’d also like to give a shout-out to the many Shadowrun PnP-players we met in Cologne – we actually didn’t think we’d meet so many of you at gamescom!

These expectations of course were very different for Gen Con – it’s a big tabletop convention and we were guests at the Catalyst booth after all, so lots Shadowrun-Players had to be expected. And those expectations were more than met! Tom had the chance to meet both old friends and people who love Shadowrun but have never heard about our game before. Like at gamescom visitors got a chance to try out the game, be it in missions, coop or in PvP and we got a chance to collect feedback and discuss the game. However, as pictures say more than words, here’s a video Tom did while Gen Con – enjoy!

However even after Gen Con things didn’t quiet down for us. Tom headed to Boston, which – as you know – is where our game is taking place. Perfect opportunity to meet Shadowrunners there, gather some Boston intel and discuss the game? Yes, so we said too, so we did two live events during his stay there. Thanks Comicazi and Pandemonioum Books and Games for having us and to the Tabletop Role Play Society of Boston for helping us organizing those events. You were great!

Now however it’s time to end our look back at event season – by Monday everyone will be back in the office and diligently finish the next update and plan the one after that. That however is a topic for another Dev-Diary … so let’s close with some more impressions of the conventions instead. See you in the game, Chummers!

Dev-Diary #11: Some Nostalgia

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In this week’s Dev-Diary our lead programmer Tom Kment looks back at what Shadowrun Online looked like waaaaaay back – and he’s even got us some pictures so everyone can see how far we’ve come since we started on this journey!

During clean-up of my “unsorted” folder I stumbled upon some screenshots from the early days of our project.

The first one below was taken during construction of the Shadowrun Gameserver where we tested our command relay architecture.

The second one depicts a bug where characters were spawned twice because of a command processing issue.

And now one from our most recent version.

That’s enough Nostalgia for now. Time to fix some bugs and implement some new features!

Dev-Diary #12: Answering a technical question

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Dev-Diary #11 led to a rather intersesting technical question. So our lead programmer took some time to look away from the code and answer it in today’s dev-diary.

Hi there! I noticed this question in our forums regarding the architecture of Shadowrun Online:
Quote “Rückenbürste”

There is one thing I am wondering about regarding the design of this type of game; maybe you’re kind enough to answer this one for me?
How does your communication protocol look like? Does every client have a copy of the complete game state which gets synchronized by the server or does the client only know what it needs to know? Also, how do updates look like? When goofing around with this for myself I figured that for instance google proto buffers would be insufficient since they don’t support inheritance, which is something you really want – a gun would need ammo, be it standard ammo, APDS ammo or gel rounds. Or don’t you enforce the internal logic at the protocol level and just send around integers which are object codes, which would then require the client and server to verify each message before accepting it?

Okay, so here’s the answer – but be prepared, though I will try my best not to get too “techy”, it might still require some technical background to understand.
All clients receive a copy of the current state after login and only apply updates to their state.

After login, communication is done via a middleware and consists of messages containing commands liks “start mission4″, “go to position (2,1)” or “use skill 432 at position (5,3)”. These commands represent available user interaction with the game but don’t include actual state changes.

Any command is checked by the server to see if it was sent by a valid client and is distributed to any client and server that will be affected by it. There it is executed and updates the state of the receiver within its execution.

Hopefully I was able to give you a bit more insight into how Shadowrun Online works.

Dev-Diary #13: Gurkinators

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In this week’s Dev-Diary we let you in on the secret of the Gurkinator. “What’s that”, you ask? Read on!

The lucky ones of you have made it to the last mission, where our intrepid hacker is out on a sinister robot-gantry-arm thing trying to free Alisi. The entire contraption is nicknamed “Gurkinator”, because allegedly at some time it looked like a robot holding a jar of pickles.

Since in leveldesign you always try to stretch every asset as creatively as possible, to build the things that you have in your mind the Gurkinator was an excellent swiss-army-knife solution for many a problem. Here are couple of environments that were built with Gurkinator bits, and we promise that if you know how to look you’ll find plenty more.

Dev-Diary #14: The Road to Linux

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It’s Friday and we’re back with a new Dev-Diary. This time our Community Manager Florian AKA “Soundrel” is talking about the long and winding road to the Linux release that was just announced to be happening on October 2nd.

When you release a game – even if it’s „just“ early access – you will get a lot of questions regarding when it will be out on a specific platform. After all, there are lots of players who either only have access to a certain type of gaming device or just prefer to play on a specific one. Believe me, I know as answering them is part of my job description . Of course we’d like to bring Shadowrun Online to as many platforms as possible as soon as possible, however adding a new platform means a lot of work. It’s not enough to simply get the game to start on its new home; you have to properly adapt it to run smoothly – and even when you are done with that, you have to know that you have just committed to maintain this platform for all future releases. The latter part mostly involves QA, who have to check every version thoroughly before each update to make certain that nothing we changed or added caused the game to be unplayable. But of course this also affects all other departments who have to fix any new issues.

That’s the main reason why we have been reluctant to add another version to the fold after releasing Shadowrun Online into Early Access for Windows and Mac – being a small indie developer means we also have a small QA department and adding another version strains resources we need to make sure that all other parts of the game make it out to you as bug free as possible. Perhaps this explains that we weren’t deaf to the constant pleas to finally bring the game to Linux – we were just waiting for the right time and the right way to do it without compromising developing the game.

This time has come now: With the next update we will bring the game to the Linux community on Steam. There is a catch however: As those of you with Linux knowledge will know, there are many distributions out there – too many to test for our limited resources. That means that the coming release should only be considered an alpha, as it was only tested on one distribution, specifically a freshly installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that we spiced up with the proprietary graphics drivers for the installed card.

We are confident that Shadowrun Online will work on other distros (possibly with a little help – but after all, most Linux fans we know of are amazing at tinkering with their system) but can’t be certain. Thus we’re calling out to all Linux gaming enthusiasts to help each other out in making the game run smoothly, to help us with their feedback to make the game run on as many distributions as possible and to spread the word – Shadowrun Online is finally coming to Linux!
See you in the Shadow of the Penguin, Chummers!

Dev-Diary #15: The magic behind creating a level

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Did you ever wonder how a level in Shadowrun Online gets made? In this week’s Dev-Diary our Lead Level Designer Marko Jelen tells you about the steps each level goes through before you get to see it.

Each map starts with an idea. There are several approaches on how to start: Some like to scribble, others like to figure things out as they go. This map was born on paper, we iterated and bounced some concepts, and had the level-flow working in our heads before we even started building anything.

The next step is blocking out the basic layout with game components. Here you can see the different cover types, blocked tiles, as well as randomized spawn points and interactive objects in their true form. This stage has already all gameplay elements working and is used to playtest and iterate.

Once we’re happy with the design we start building onto it. You usually already know what assets you will put where from the blocking stage, so this stage is mainly making things look awesome.

Finally we add effects and lights. Since real-time lights are expensive, we bake light sources into a separate “lightmap” – an additional texture that contains light-intensity and -color for the whole level and is added to an objects base texture. Quick and cheap.

That’s all the magic there is in creating a level. Off to the next.

[Rasetsu [Men]]

Dev-Diary #16: Statistics!

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We know that some of you think we’re not reading and reacting your concerns and feedback. The simple truth is: We read everything you say – and sometimes even track the things you don’t say. How you ask? Let us show you.

The feedback you give is invaluable – and the fact that we’re currently changing a lot of things in the game based on your comments (those of you who listened to our latest Q&A have gotten a couple of hints about that) is a testament to that. However feedback is not everything. After all it represents just the slice of players that are vocal about their opinions, while the silent part of the community won’t be heard this way. And who knows, perhaps only a minority wants to change something, while the majority is actually content with the status quo (or vice versa). Or are they not saying anything, but feeling the same like those people who voice their opinion? We found that we needed to find another instrument that would tell us what all our customers were experiencing in the game.

The solution we came up with was rather simple: By the second update the game started tracking anonymous usage stats, like how long players stayed in the game for one session, how long they took to finish a mission and – rather importantly – how many actually managed to complete a specific run. Over time new functions were added – for example, once the ability to select your own loadout was introduced into the game, our designers were interested what people took into their missions and who did succeed and who lost with specific weapons, so that was added.

The statistics may be surprising to some, but probably only reinforce what you already thought. For example: 89% of those who tried succeed in the first campaign mission, but while the dreaded final mission called “Heart & Soul” can be won (as the statistic shows), only 34 tries out of 293 (11.6%) ended in a win between the latest update on October 2nd and October 6th. Hardest mission in the game, you think? Think again. The daily mission in which you defend the barrels wins this prize – only 16 victories out of 263 attempts (6.8%). So if you lose that one, know that you are not alone.

However some of you might have noticed that with the latest update we not only brought in new weapons and skills, but also tried to make at least some missions easier. So while these numbers are interesting on their own, it’s also quite interesting how they change. For example: Obviously our attempt of reducing difficulty worked with the first mission – it was won by only 62% in the September update –, but not so much with Heart & Soul (September: 72 victories out of 891 tries – an 8% success rate). So we’ll get back and rework aspects of the game and the mission, till we’re content that the mission is manageable – and the numbers show we are right.

Before we come to an end this time, here’s a another hopefully helpful snippet from our statistics: Those of you who would like to survive Heart & Soul should try it with a character that has the skull and the Skua DMR equipped and another character carrying skull and the katana – according to our statistics, this was the most successful loadout for the run since we released the last update; those who are looking for a challenge however should take a character with the skull and the Skua DMR and another having the Skua DMR plus the Machete – with 9 losses definitely the worst combo of the bunch for this map. Weather the loadout was the sole reason for losing or if there were other factors contributing to the characters dying is another story that the statistics can’t tell us though – every tool has its limits, after all …

[Rasetsu [Men]]

I Spy

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Those of you who read our Autumn Update know that we’re overhauling a lot of the gameplay of Shadowrun Online. Today our lead designer Tom is going to talk about a new system that was often requested in your feedback …

We are currently doing a lot of work trying to extend our missions – adding interactions that are more than just combat. One of these is an actual “fog of war” system which means that you will no longer be able to see everything. What you’re seeing below is the current debug visualisation – black overlay means that the area is completely unknown, green is something that you’ve discovered before but nobody in your team can currently see. For enemies this has two fairly large repercussions – on the one hand enemies that are not in your line of sight will not be displayed at all (duh!), on the other hand enemies that have not seen YOU will usually be in a new state – “out of combat”, which means that basically they’re chillin, guarding or doing whatever it is that they do when you cannot see them.

An enemy that is out of combat also doesn’t have any of the usual aggressive behaviors attached, so they won’t be looking for you, and also don’t know where you are. When one enemy of a team sees you however, all of his buddies will be coming for you. There will also still be some enemies that react the way they do now – that they actively pursue you and try to kill you wherever you are.
Right now we’re sufficiently happy with the way the algorithm handles shared perception and peeking around corners, so next up is to beef up the visualisation to something suitably snazzy.

Pretty People

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Character Creation has taught us one thing: While our in game models were fine for viewing in game, they didn’t look that well once we got to see them in close up. In this issue of our Dev-Diary, our Lead Designer Tom shows our improvements in that regard.

One thing that touched us most from the feedback we got at the conventions this season was that one person who asked “Will I be able to create a pretty girl too?”.
Apart from our initial reflex to go all huffy and puffy and say “We think they ARE pretty!” we went back over the original player models which were created a pretty long time ago (at least in game development years, which are very similar to dog years), looked at the technical requirements and restrictions that we had at that time and decided that it was high time for a thorough makeover.

So we approximately doubled the amount of polys that we use for a single body (with the current gen of tablets this is less of an issue than we feared) and gave all textures a good, highres bit of lovin. In the process of this we also redid a lot of the models, changing shapes and proportions as much as the rig would allow.

We hope you like, and to that nice person – we hope this is what you wanted:

Hairy and scary

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As we already announced, all our departments are currently working on a lot of improvements and changes to Shadowrun Online. Expect more news about the changes within the upcoming weeks. For this issue of our dev diary series however we’re going to follow up to last week’s blog entry that presented our improved human player model. Ever since we posted it, people have been asking “Are you touching up the other races too?” Here’s the answer, written again by our lead designer Tom.

In addition to the last “pretty people” update, of course we also tried to give our male models a bit of extra attention. Stefan, our concept and texture artists turned out to be a veritable maestro when it comes to creating well-defined male bottoms and aesthetically pleasing clusters of chest, leg and back hair.
Here’s how our dwarfes are a lot more dwarfy, the orcs a bit more orcy and the trolls… well, we finally think they’re worthy of the name:

Skills

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The last two issues of our blog series about the development of Shadowrun Online were filled with graphical updates. This time however we want to show you more than just new character models, but rather give you an answer to a question we have been asked alot lately: How will the skill system change? Our lead game designer Tom has the answer to that question.

In the version currently live we have a rudimentary system of proficiencies – actually they are SR5 skills, but we renamed them as not to confuse them with the skills that you use within a mission. At the moment they have an influence on how effective you are with a weapon, with an internal mechanic very similar to the precision rating of weapons in SR5.

However, just adding numbers is a bit boring so the new system will be extended to include active skills.

In the new skill trees you can learn new active skills with karma, and have some actual choices while doing it. This means that you’ll be able to spend karma on new skills, or enhanced versions of skills you already have.

[Rasetsu [Men]]

Putting the logic in levels

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During the last weeks we’ve been mostly showing you new features coming to Shadowrun Online soon. This time however we’d like to give you another glimpse behind the curtain, showing you how we create the things you get to play. Please welcome Chris, a veteran programmer at Cliffhanger Productions who recently joined the Shadowrun Online Team.

I switched to the SRO team only some days ago, so we had to find something that will introduce me to how things in SRO work without binding too many other precious resources. As I always like to help the other developers to be more productive we finally settled on improving our tools for creating levels. After all, getting missions out quicker and in better quality will always help with the overall product!

So what takes a map from being a pretty sight to a fully playable level inside SRO?

After the initial phases for a level where the layout is planned and assets get placed in a level to make it look pretty (Editor’s note: Some may recall our dev-diary about the design process on a level. If not, check it out here), our level designers have to go into each of them and add “logic” to the level. After all running through empty levels without any way to win them won’t make a very good game. And that is a pretty work intensive task:

First we need to define how big the level actually is. For this we have a custom made Grid component that defines how large a map will be. In our example below the map is 37×31 cells big.

To define where you can go the grid will look at each cell and if it finds something there that doesn’t look like floor the cell will become one of the defined states we have. In the example aboveyou can see green for walkable, yellow for cover and red for walls.

Adding spawn points which define where you or the enemies spawn is a pretty straightforward process. Just drag our spawn point prefab into the scene and place it where you want an enemy to spawn. Then you have to define who will spawn here and which difficulty should be spawned. Additionally there is all sorts of crazy stuff that could happen if someone spawns. Want to spawn a spirit after the spawned enemy died? Let a door (yes they are also spawned at spawn points when they are interactive) play a special sound and trigger alarms upon opening? All of this is possible.

Triggering something when you enter a specific area is called a “Movement Trigger” in our gameplay engine. Basically you can define an area on the grid which will then do something for you. As these areas don’t have any visual representation for the most part it is hard find them or get an overview for a level you haven’t worked on for some time without searching for them. This was an area I improved lately. There is now a new window “Logic Viewer” which displays an overview of all the logic currently present in the level. It also has the capabilities to display all movement triggers and their names directly in the scene. Which comes in handy if you have several of them.

What would a level be without stuff to click at? As I already mentioned before, interactive doors can be placed through spawn points, but these are not the only objects available (just think of the body drawers in “The Organ Farm”). I also added a quick overview to see all the interactive parts of the level.

Finally someone needs to combine all these different elements and what activates what, not to mention someone needs to set an objective for this mission. This is what the level designers lovely dubbed “Goalomat”. Here you can define a lot of interaction between spawn points, triggers and interactive objects and also finally say “if you reach GOTO:Finish the mission will be won”.

I hope you liked the short tour through our logic map design process.

A view of Boston

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Up to now you were playing mission after mission in Shadowrun Online, but never got a firm sense of where in Boston the action took place. Yes, there were some texts describing where we were heading in the mission descriptions, but these weren’t adequate to give you the feeling of the action taking place in various parts of a city. With the next update however you won’t have to rely on text alone anymore: A city map representing Boston will show you where you will be heading next. We asked our technical artist Riccardo to share a bit more about the creation of this map.

As we were never trying to create an actual open world in Shadowrun Online (which would allow you to wander the streets freely to get from quest to quest), it was always clear to us that we would need to have a map of Boston to show you where the various missions will take place and where you can find places to meet Traders and Johnsons. But while we always knew we would have a map, what it would look like was discussed and tested quite a lot. For example, one of the first versions was a simple top-down view of the map of Boston that showed the various districts. By now this has evolved into a 3D representation of the city that – after some adjustments and tests – looks a bit like a holographic display of the town that shows the points of interest.

Getting that look just right took a bit of testing. At first we went for a wireframe look (see picture above) that we kept rotating as you looked upon it, but weren’t satisfied with the results. In the end we accidentally applied blur to the 3D model which resulted in a scanline look we liked. That doesn’t mean that the picture you see below is the final version you’re going to see in the game, as we still have some work left to do, but it’s close to what you can expect to see once the next update becomes available.

I hope you enjoyed our little preview – see you in the shadows of Boston, Chummers!