Dev Update - February 6th, 2019 (Patreon)

Heyo all! Vilsa here with another quick little Dev Update! Not much to show as we just released 0.8.0 to Patrons. Hope you guys are enjoying it! This week will be a little different. Instead of looking into the future, let's take some time to look into the past!

Anniversary

Monday of this week was TC's first anniversary. It's officially been one year since we released 0.1.0 back in February 2018! It's amazing to look back and see just how far we've come from what was once a parody game to where we are now.

Not only has Third Crisis grown as a game, but we've grown as a development team as well. We didn't have much experience with making an RPG (or any long-term game at all), and we've been learning much very quickly as we continue to make this game the best it can be.

I did some digging and I've found a lot of development material from when were developing 0.1.0 (as a parody game).

This is the main menu of Third Crisis 0.1.0-a19, the last build I could find before Jenna became Jenna. It was made to be an authentic recreation of Overwatch's main menu. I personally love making things feel authentic, making the game look like it could fit in side-by-side with its source material. TC's logo back then was a good example of that desire to look authentic.

Here's 0.8.0's main menu for reference. Some things have changed.

Carceburg has grown in building count, the logo is now our own, the layout has changed, and now we've got one of our own original characters displayed here instead of one borrowed or based off of someone else. It still has that Overwatch DNA in it, and that's perfectly okay. We're no longer trying to imitate, we've branched off and are heading down our own path now.

Origins

When bearcore and I originally starting making what eventually became Third Crisis, we were inspired by games like Noxian Nights from Hreinn Games and we wanted to make an adult RPG game in Unity. We didn't really have an idea of what the final vision was, just that we really really wanted to make an adult RPG. One of our first prototypes was simply a tiny grass level with a character that could walk around. The placeholder character we used was a naked version of Jessie from Pokemon in sprite form, and we also used a Pokemon tileset for the grass. Progress was slow and we really had no idea what sort of story we wanted to do, other than we wanted it to be sexy.

Eventually, we figured out what source material we wanted to draw from. We wanted it to be an Overwatch parody game featuring Tracer and we were going to include characters like Sombra and Mercy. We essentially wanted to make the same sort of game as Noxian Nights, but with Overwatch instead of League of Legends. Here is a little example of what we came up with after a lot of painstaking work trying to figure out exactly how to put together an RPG-style map with top-down movement, interactables, and dialogue.

This is way before we found Gear as an artist. So we were using mainly placeholder assets to display Tracer in dialogue. Here's a link to the cool artist that made these images that we found on google images. 

https://www.deviantart.com/lopuii/art/Tracer-in-Fire-Emblem-style-627424484 

Asuna

This prototype that we were building was called 'Asuna' just as an internal project name since we had no clue what actual title we wanted to call this thing. We came up with some small little sequence where Sombra would be hacking into Watchpoint Gibraltar and you had to fight Talon soldiers. We put together a combat system that is actually pretty close to what eventually became 0.1's combat (minus the dashing). This prototype ended off with a poorly written scene of Sombra masturbating while you watched her. 

So now we've got a working game and it's time to head into production to add stuff to it, right? Well... This is where we gave up on Asuna. We had been trying to find an artist for the longest time without success, because we knew that without original CGs, we would be dead in the water. So we gave up on our dream of making an adult RPG like Noxian Nights.

But obviously you know that things didn't stay that way. After a few unsuccessful attempts to push into mainstream game development, we decided to give it another shot about half a year after Asuna's failure and doubled down on our efforts to find an artist. That's when Gear contacted us and we began working as hard as we could on what is now Third Crisis.

Asuna's Legacy

Sometimes we like to show this old prototype off on stream, and I tried to get it working to show it off here, but I couldn't get it working anymore beyond the gifs I've shown above.

Fun fact: the legacy of Asuna can still be seen today. If you're on our Discord and you have your patreon account linked. You can see our #git-updates channel, where notifications are sent in real-time whenever we update our internal Third Crisis repo, along with our descriptions of what we added. The name of this repo is 'Asuna2', which was a name we came up with after coming together with Gear and restarting from scratch with Asuna as a blueprint. 

'Asuna' is also what we now call the RPG framework we made that sits on top of our personal game toolkit in Unity, which Third Crisis is in turn built on top of (ANToolkit > Asuna > Third Crisis). The reason we have it setup like this is for if we ever want to create other RPG games using the same generic RPG systems (Missions, Dialogue, Characters, Combat, Journals, etc) we've made that Third Crisis takes advantage of.

Dialogue Sketches

Now that Gear was working with us, production actually began and real progress was starting to be made! While we completely restarted programming and story from scratch, we had Gear making a dialogue sprite that could finally replace the placeholder image that we had been using for the longest time.

Here is a compilation of sketches that Gear made for the original Tracer sprite. We originally wanted multiple poses for a more emotive character with some movement to it, but this started to get incredibly difficult to keep up with, even with the mere four layers of clothing we had to keep track of that makes up Tracer's default outfit. (Arm Holsters, Main Outfit, Accelerator, Underwear). 

For reference in 0.8.0 we now have to keep track of around 80 layers including damaged variations. If you had to do 5 different poses for each of those layers, you can start to see why we stuck with a single pose now.

The 'angry' pose was one we struggled to make look good, but we eventually decided to use the 'happy' pose instead (with an angry face attached to it), which sorta resembles Jenna's current pose now.

Level Blueprints

We made blueprints of levels before putting them together in game. Here is the blueprint for the first level: Construction Site, which eventually turns into Carceburg in the future.

The basic layout has survived, but small details haven't. We removed the river and removed the multiple paths to the right to avoid confusion on where to go. Carceburg (the green lines) also got a large change from what we originally laid out in this early image.

Here is the Inner 'Watchpoint' that eventually became called Inner Stronghold where you fight Leath. The layout has stayed exactly the same, but what filled it (mostly the room to the bottom left) has changed.

Once again, this level's layout has completely survived today. It's fascinating to see just how closely we've followed our original concepts even now.

Here's the motel. Only with minor changes to the counter in the bottom left.

There are some levels that have completely changed layout though. This is mainly because of our priority swap from serving drinks in the bar (which we still plan to implement) to Jewel and her purpose in the bar of being a dancer on a stage. The original plan for the bar was to have a downstairs and upstairs, but those were cut to save from adding a lot of useless space.

A Tough Decision

Third Crisis now had a name, it had a story, it had working gameplay, it had a beginning and an end, it had an antagonist (Leath is exactly the same now as she was back then), it had a Tracer dialogue sprite. We were at the end of 2017, and we were just a couple CGs away from releasing. 0.1.0 was basically complete, and we were just polishing tiny details up. The closer we got to release, the more worried we got about putting all our eggs in what was potentially a ticking time bomb if Blizzard somehow found out about us and didn't like us making money from Patreon off of using Tracer. 

We had heard about all the OW porn that was getting taken down, and how companies like Nintendo was treating fangames (like AM2R and Pokemon Uranium). Even though we didn't think it was likely that Blizzard would take issue with us, we got more and more anxious after the months of effort we had put in to make sure 0.1.0 was the best we could make it.

Just before Gear started working on the initial CGs (which would lock us into our decision to use Tracer), we finally decided to completely remove all explicit reference to Blizzard's IP, and make our own IP. We didn't want to scrap the entire demo we had, so we had to make a compromise. Our MC would have to be somewhat like Tracer so that her dialogue would still make sense. We also had to make sure that all this lore that I had written to fit in another IP would be able to stand on its own without requiring prior knowledge of Blizzard's work. 

So Tracer became Jenna, Winston became HQ, Talon became Peitho, Omnics became Andros, and Third Crisis became our own. We made this decision in December 2017, two months before we released in February 2018 a year ago.

Here was an old version of our logo, moving away from the Overwatch-styled one.

Creating Jenna

Now that we knew we wanted to break away into our own IP, we had to come up with a new design for our main character. We started with the face, looking at what sort of hairstyles she could have. We tried to keep in mind how her speed and carefree nature could impact how her hair would look, and we settled on 'it would be messy'. Here's an early concept of Jenna's face.

That looked nice, but we liked this concept even more.

Now that we had her face, it was time to come up with her body. We wanted a slim athletic build because she was a runner, a fast character.

You might notice that her legs are stronger than her arms because of her runner nature. We wanted to emphasize her lower body strength versus her comparatively weaker upper body strength. This isn't to say she's a weakling, but she's just a better runner because of her speedy nature.

Now it's time for her outfit, this was the initial concept for it.

Despite what you might think, the design of Jenna's more open jacket wasn't actually inspired by Tracer, but more Trunks from Dragon Ball.

This was a good starting point, but we wanted her to have running shoes instead of boots because she's a runner!

Buuut more futuristic sci-fi running shoes!

We tossed around ideas of masks or goggles, but decided against it.

Now we've got some cleaned up line art of Jenna's concept! That means one more thing-

Color! But something seems a little off...

Apparently I didn't really like the yellow jacket back then, but now I love it!

Now we had Jenna's final concept as we know her now. After finishing this up, Gear then used this reference image to make the original dialogue sprite set for Jenna.

Here's a little excerpt from our internal character sheet of Jenna when we were concepting her. 

We specifically wanted to avoid colors that were associated with Tracer like Oranges. The problem was we wanted to have Jenna's colors still convey the sense of speed in her character DNA that she got from Tracer. We wanted to have yellow to convey the speed, and eventually blue and white became a part of her palette to complement it. Eventually, the tan Jacket went away and became a yellow one. We were super happy with ourselves, we had a color palette that fit what we wanted without ripping off Tracer. Then after locking in the concept and drawing the final dialogue sprites, we realized that we had forgotten about one of Tracer's other skins...

Goddammit.

How Far We've Come

It may be hard to believe from how long this post is, but a TON of stuff has been skipped over when putting this together because of lack of archived evidence and just my poor memory when trying to recall TC's journey to its first birthday.

We've gone from having GearZs as our sole artist to now having RatedEHCS for dialogue sprites (meaning we can now have way more dialogue sprites than we originally planned), Scapefiend for new overworld art (you may have noticed his work in the motel for 0.8). Most of the writing of the story fell on me with bearcore helping out with the occasional scene, but now we have starryGrail (our newest addition) to help with writing and we're excited to see the fun dialogue that she'll be writing.

As TC grows, we grow as developers, gaining more and more experience with each day. We went from barely having a lewd CG in 0.1.0, to now having everything from groping to tentacle sex and much more to come. We went from a single player character to now having two other original characters with their own backstories in her party to accompany her. We went from maybe an hour max of playtime, to now having multiple hours of playtime even when you're trying to rush through. We went from not knowing how TC would end, to now having a whole story timeline laid out that we'll be following.

The Future

We're aiming to finish Third Crisis by the end of 2019, and we're going to be working as hard as we can to make that deadline. We've only finished a third of the story so far, and the speed at which we add more story is increasing every month. I can't wait to see what Third Crisis will look like on its second birthday, and I hope you'll still be reading these little Dev Updates every Wednesday (but sometimes Thursday). 

New Environment Art

These WIP snapshots for 0.9.0 came in while I was writing this long-winded post! Here's a little reward for sitting through my nostalgic rambling. ♥

That's all for this week! We'll see you next week on Wednesday for another Development Update!

Happy Birthday, TC!