The story so far...

Do you like reading?
More than looking at pictures?
Good.
Here we go.

It all started when Francisco was 6 years old.
As a young and excited boy that he was, Francisco would play videogames for hours on end.
His parents still recall that one time when they thought he was crying because some bully made fun of him on the playground. No. Those were 10 hour long CRT videogame tears. The best kind of tears.
Yes. Because back in the day real men (or boys in this case) would play videogames on Cathodic Ray Tube TVs. You know, the glass box with a huge light bulb inside directly pointed at your eyeballs.

 

If you look closely, you can see the tears in Francisco's eyes (he is the one holding the controller)

Some years passed and Francis, now a young man, decided he would take on his life long dream of creating videogames by enrolling on a videogame course.
He decided to go to the best videogame course in Lisbon* where the best teachers taught. The Videogames and Animation HND course. There he met the greatest videogame developer (and teacher) of all time, Filipe**.
Together with Filipe, he learned that making videogames made him no money whatsoever. After all, why was he there teaching videogames instead of making them?
Money.
Obviously.

Filipe teaching... somewhere... something... in very low res

*We've heard it lost its charm recently
**He paid us to say this

During his tenure at Etic, Fran worked on a concept for a new and interesting videogame.
A platformer game about a little boy escaping from a factory. He would use his spear to construct his own platforms and activate buttons and things.
Helped by the greatest videogame course coordinator of all time***, Ivan, Fran and his colleague Vasco from IST, worked on Out of Line for 3 months so that they could apply to the 2018 PlayStation Awards.

Francisco and Vasco at Etic "studying" videogames

***He also paid us to say this

Amazingly and without anyone expecting it, they won the Portuguese PlayStation Awards!
They won the Best Game and the Press Award. They took home 10.000€, a PS4 dev kit and 50.000€ worth of marketing money,

Francisco and Vasco at the 2018 PlayStation Awards in Lisbon

Obviously, F knew that this was not normal as videogames normally don't make any money, so he asked Fil if he and his company Nerd Monkeys could help in organizing and producing the full videogame.
Fil met with Nerd Monkeys co-founder Diogo and Etic coordinator Iv. to discuss if this was a viable proposition.
After pretending for some time that they were not interested and that they didn't need more money or projects, they accepted.

(We searched for a photo of Ivan but couldn't find it. Maybe next time.)

Meanwhile, V. decided to pursue other cool projects and a new programmer was brought in.
João Genebra, or as we like to call him, J. worked on a brand new build and started everything from scratch with F.
After that, F. spent an entire year with F., J. and D. at N.M.working to get O.L. into a reliable V.S.

This is the strangest photo we could find of the team working

Nevermind, maybe this one is stranger

Finally and after almost 1,5 years of developing, showing, pitching and producing the team managed to get a deal with a publisher to get the game out the door.

But since we can't talk about the deal, the money or the publisher yet, the "story so far" ends here.
In its due time, we will get back to this and tell you the rest of the story, hopefully after a successful launch.

Until then...
Chop chop lollipop.

Events, events, EVENTS!

oHHHHhhh yes.
We have been uper busy being at events. Also super tired.
We were at Games LX Week... wait, or was that XL Games Lisboa? XXL Games Weekend? Mannn, it's complicated, OK!? These things can suck the life out of anybody, if they are not careful.

XL Games World

So, this one event takes place BEFORE Lisboa Games Week* and it's sponsored by some mobile carrier brand that we will not mention here. It ran from 14 to the 17th of November in Pavilhão Atlântico** and it hosted the cool Indie XL for indie gamers! Which also includes the PlayStation Talents section where Out of Line and Nerd Monkeys were included.

We got to hang out with other talented indie developers and play their games as well.
Meanwhile, our latest build was shown and attendees got to playtest our current build.

A PlayStation branded stage greets this simple man and complex woman

"Dad, can we try other games, now?" - "Shut up and play Out of Line, son."

The Indie XL area. All full of Out of Line fans.

The best game in the show.

At some point, Francisco was called on stage to talk about Out of Line by PlayStation Portugal, which was super cool! He was on stage with Marco and some other 2 random cool guys.

Marco from KEO talked about how Out of Line and San changed his life.

*Yeap, it's Lisboa and not Lisbon even though they like to use the fancy English names. Go figure.
** As if we were also going to write that ugly name that they use to call Pavilhão Atlântico

Lisboa Games Week

So, this one took place AFTER XL Games World* but at least it is not sponsored by some silly brand. Still a bit strange that it has the Portuguese word for Lisbon in it's fancy English name... oh well.
Again, Out of Line was present in the indie section called "Loading Zone" in this event that took place inside FIL (Feira Internacional de Lisboa) and ran from the 21st to the 24th.

We got to hang out with even MORE indie developers and were thrilled to get even more people to play our latest build!

Yes, that's a stand on the left with some other game from Nerd Monkeys. Nobody cares.

Another event! Weeeeeeeee!

*XL? Not LX as in Lisbon? Does it mean it's an Extra Large event? What does THAT even mean?

Anyway

Everyone was tired by the end of it!
Both events lasted each 4 grueling days and they tended to finish around 10pm!!! WAT!

Diogo pretending to be tired, HAHAHA, HE IS ALWAYS TIRED!

At the end of the events Diogo and Genebra broke the chairs with "cheer boredom".

Going to events is important and... well... are they? ...we are SOOOO tired... see you next post...
Bla bla bla zzzzzz....

Rope mechanics

Hello "Out of Liners"!
Is that a thing? Let's make that a thing.

We have been busy all through out our Portuguese summer and the team worked hard on two big things. The first was all about implementing a first version of the entire levels from start to finish into Unity. The second was designing, testing and polishing a new feature, the rope mechanic.
We won't be showing the levels design as that would be a major spoiler but we will show and talk about the awesome new and cool rope mechanic.

The rope mechanic
Now, whats better that being able to throw a spear and use it as a platform? What about attaching a rope to said spear and use the rope as a transversal mechanic? Hum? What? You've seen this before? Pfff, shut up. Our is a much better rope mechanic than any previous rope mechanics. We call it the Incredible Rope Mechanic™



Programming the rope mechanic
For the rope implementation, the main characteristics we wanted it to have was for it to be able to withstand the player's weight and other objects and have a dynamic length.

To withstand the weight, the solution was to have as few segments as possible composing the rope to reduce the tension between each segment's hinges. The problem with this is that visually, the rope looks really blocky and you can clearly see each individual segment, so we just make the segments invisible and simply draw a line by interpolating the positions of all the segments.

In terms of the dynamic length, this was necessary due to the fact that when the spear is thrown, we don't know how long it needs to be. The solution was to set a ratio of segments per distance and activate/deactivate each segment as needed. If the rope needs to stretch, more segments are activated. If the rope needs to shorten, more segments are deactivated. This way we make sure there aren't any gaps in between segments so nothing falls through the rope.

Rope transversal working with San transversal included
The idea came from the need to add a new mechanic to San's spear that did not look like just a power up but just a normal progression and adaptation of the spear to the environment. This is the overall idea of the game, not having power-ups and focus more on the story and transversal, so it makes sense that the spear evolves in the same manner.

Design ideas for possible in-game obstacles
The spear mechanics means we can connect objects we wouldn't in any other way. Examples; we can create connections / bridges between platforms to cross over; create crane systems and then use them to pull or push and control objects; lock moving objects like platforms or even enemies; etc.
Usually these bridges created by the spear can support objects, the main character and secondary characters.

We can't show you much of our ideas as we implement and design the entire game, but you can see the team sweating as they endure the Portuguese heat. Can you feel it? Even San is digitally sweating.

Francisco and João laugh as they have no clue how to actually make a game

We have no rulers in the office so everything is measured in a more traditional fashion

The rope mechanic being test by João Genebra, the Incredible Rope Mechanic™ programmer

Testing out a build on the PlayStation4... with a PlayStation4 controller... in a PlayStation4 DevKit... you get the idea

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In a while, crocodile!

Making the best game possible!

Hello and stuff
So, just like we said on the first post, we are moving on from the old blog to the new.
No more looking back, no regrets and so on. OH! Don't you dare go back there again and look at all that OLD art and stuff!

Studies for Out of Line environment settings

Current plan
So, we are all at Nerd Monkeys offices, working on Out of Line. The monkeys were kind enough to let us use their space and... err.. maybe even help us publish the game! YES! AND MONEY! Oh please, YES! We need more money to create this thing... well, not to create it, but to... you know, eat and pay bills and stuff.
Also, that money we got from the PlayStation Awards doesn't stretch that much, you know?

The PlayStation Awards!

Status of development
Right, about our game.
We have been hard at work on a multitude of things, on this second blog post we will cover two main aspects that we decided to improve upon the old ones. The brand new look of the game and the feature implemented way back late last year of the moving trees, plants and other objects.

The old game vs the new game = it's an all new game!
Out of Line was a project that came out of Francisco's mind back in the days when he was still studying at Etic. The first prototype was done in a short period of time and it was also Francisco's first attempt at it. So it's normal that things eventually get redone, and for the better! The art style and work has progressed immensely since those days has you can see by the comparison below:

2017 build

2018 build

"Look, there is some movement in the trees..."
A forest or any out door environment looks basic and dull if it's static. The same principal applies in videogames. In Out of Line, San is constantly traveling through slopes, platforms and patches of green grass so it was imperative that we reviewed our pipeline and somehow make things move convincingly. The first approach would be to animate everything individually, but that would take too much time considering the amount of assets in the game. Also, animating by bones or meshes would be probably very taxing on the CPU / GPU and doing it by keyframe would look too dated. The solution was to animate everything using a shader that displaces the texture's UV's. The shader takes a deformer texture, like an image with a gradient, and uses it's color values to distort the sprite. Then, to animate the sprite the shader scrolls the deformer texture.
Additionaly the shader uses a mask to define areas of the sprite that are not affected by the distortion.

Textture + mask + gradient (deformer texture)

Asset in Unity with animation (not loopable)

Everything looks so much better now, you can even feel the breeze coming through the monitor... hummmm... (hair sways gently).

San enjoys the breeze.

Well, that's it for now. Hope you enjoy our new dev blog here on blogger (not sponsored message). And don't forget to follow us here and on Twitter!

Hasta la vista, malabarista!