Wenn Geschichte, Grafik und Gameplay eins werden

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that both the beautiful 2D art and the adventure narrative in Dead Mage’s 2D roguelike dungeon crawler were influenced by Persian folklore. After all, Dead Mage’s founder and studio leader, Amir H. Fassihi, is originally from Iran.

But integrating the fascinating mythological themes of the narrative into a hack-and-slash game, came with challenges.

“We wanted the characters and the narrative to be important, but we couldn’t jam a traditional linear narrative into it because it just wouldn’t make sense in the overall game,” says Jakobsen Locke, the narrative designer on the team.

Dead Mage’s solution was to create a few key cutscenes that develop the story and present them to players at key points in the game.

“One person telling the players the story as they witness it gave us the ability to give players the information they need as quickly as possible, make an emotional impact, and then get them right back into the gameplay,” Locke says.

See an example of a cutscene from Children of Morta below.

Writing the story–literally–a challenge

A plan for how to make narrative and gameplay work together is one thing, but when the developers and the narrative designer are in remote physical locations, implementation isn’t necessarily going to be simple. How would Locke get the information he needed from the developers to write the text and integrate the narrative with gameplay?

“At first, the developers would send me videos of some of the cinematics to Austin, which I would use to write the narrative, but we found that that was real wasteful of our time.” Locke says. “Someone would have to spend at least half a day recording video, and get that back to me, then with our time-gap, it would take upward of three days to return anything. It was just a total waste of our time.”

A 3-day process condensed into half a day in Unity

In order to make it more efficient for the developers and narrative designer to work together, Dead Mage extended the Unity editor.

“The developers created a few custom tools that allowed me to go into Unity and just quickly jump through all the animations. Then, I could write the dialog or text that we needed directly in Unity. So, the extensibility of the Unity Editor enabled us to take what was about a three-day process, and condense it into half a day to streamline the entire process,” Locke says.

See the custom animation/narrative design tool below.

In addition to customizing Unity with internal tools, Locke points out that tight integration with Excel also made work smooth. He could use the Excel functions to make sure all the text was formulated correctly and fits on the screen.

“The way I could just import a formula and it auto-imported all the subtitles just the way we wanted them straight into the game was really cool,” he says.

Eine starke Erzählung war ein Teil des Skeletts, das Children of Morta stützt. Im Mittelpunkt des Gameplay-Erlebnisses steht jedoch das Rogue-like-Abenteuer. Die Spieler verbringen viel Zeit in Höhlen, in der Wüste und im Windtempel.

„Die Rogue-like-Elemente bringen mit sich, dass sich viele Elemente des Spiels wiederholen. Deshalb wollten wir sicherstellen, dass sich jeder Spieldurchgang neu anfühlt. Um das zu erreichen, mussten wir das Spiel randomisieren, damit die Spieler in jedem Kapitel über prozedural erzeugte Szenen neue Sets, neue Power-Ups und so weiter finden konnten“, sagt Locke.

Doch die prozedural erzeugten Szenen führten wiederum dazu, dass sich die Ladezeiten verlängerten. Das Team konnte nicht alle Assets vorab laden, da das Erzeugen eines Levels bis zu fünf Minuten dauern konnte.

Verkürzung der Ladezeiten von Minuten auf Sekunden

Dead Mage hat das Ladezeitproblem behoben, indem sie Unity mit einem benutzerdefinierten Asset-Management-System erweiterten. Anstatt ein Asset aufzurufen, ruft das benutzerdefinierte Management-System die Asset-Daten ohne angehängte Grafik- oder andere große Dateien auf. Danach kann nur mit den „leichten“ Daten die benötigte Grafik aufgerufen werden.

„Das war nicht nur ein reibungsloser Übergang, um unser benutzerdefiniertes Asset-Management-Tool zu installieren, sondern hat auch unsere Ladezeiten von 4 bis 5 Minuten auf 10 oder 15 Sekunden verkürzt“, erklärt Locke.

Unten sehen Sie Dead Mages benutzerdefinierten Asset Manager.

Schnelles Prototyping macht die Spieler zu einem Teil des Prozesses

Das Gameplay in Children of Morta wurde stark von Spielern beeinflusst. Was als kleines „Leidenschaftsprojekt“ für einige Mitglieder des Dead-Mage-Teams begann, entwickelte sich bald zu einer Kickstarter-Kampagne, die es ermöglichte, Geldgeber als Testgruppe zu nutzen.

Mit der Unity Engine konnte Dead Mage innerhalb von zwei Wochen ein vollständig spielbares Build mit vielen der wichtigsten Konzepte und Ideen erstellen. Auf dieser Grundlage erstellten sie jede Woche ein neues Build mit einigen neuen Ideen, sodass sie neue Spieletester gewinnen konnten, die diese ausprobierten.

„Es war wirklich großartig, in der Prototyping-Phase mit Unity zu arbeiten. Innerhalb einer Woche hatten wir einen neuen Charakter mit groben Animationen, hatten alle Mechaniken, sodass jemand diesen neuen Charakter ausprobieren und tatsächlich sehen konnte, wie sich alles im Spiel anfühlt. Und das kostete uns höchstens fünf Werktage“, sagt Locke.

The gameplay in Children of Morta has been influenced heavily by players. What started out as a small passion project for a few key members of the Dead Mage team soon developed into a Kickstarter campaign, which enabled them to use funders as a test group.

With the Unity Engine, they were able to create a fully playable build with many of the core concepts and ideas within two weeks. Once they had that foundation, they continued to make a new build every week with some new ideas in it, so that they could get fresh play testers to come in and check it out.

“It was really great to work with Unity for the prototyping phase. Within a week, we could go so far as to have a new character in with rough animations, have the mechanics in there so that someone could try the new character out, and actually see how it feels in the game. And that would only take us five business days max,” Locke says.

In addition to feedback from the testers, Dead Mage activated Unity Analytics so they could see how players were behaving as they developed the game. Objective data revealed player preferences, such as which characters were most popular and which powers were being used most.

For example, when they experimented with giving all the characters the power to dodge, Unity Analytics showed that this affected players’ use of other powers. Specifically, once the father character had the power to dodge, players stopped using his giant shield because it was easier for them to dodge instead.

“As a result of data from Unity Analytics, we attached a whole new set of abilities that can only be activated when you’re holding the shield. So Unity Analytics drove a design decision that we could not have made if we didn’t have all the data that we’d accumulated,” Locke says.