Arbiter - Annual Recap - 2022 (Patreon)

HAPPY NEW YEARS YA FILTHY ANIMALS! 🥂

Hope everyone had some banger holidays! I took a two week break to spend time with friends and family, do some music studies, and start setting up a new D&D campaign! 

It's funny because while I expected those last two to be a nice break from work, I ended up finding a lot of parallels between them and some of the stuff I'm planning for Arby. The D&D prep was especially motivating as one of my milestones for 2023 was to start seriously grinding on level design, so naturally there was a lot of overlap when thinking about homebrew worlds.

At any rate, break's over! I'm gonna go over everything I worked on this year as well as my plans for 2023! 

DECEMBER

I only spent two weeks working in December, but I spent most of that time polishing up Wolf and Scarlet's forms. I mostly wanted to bring them up to the quality of the other forms, as I found their mechanics a little lacking by comparison. 

In Scarlet's case, I mostly just shuffled some of her moveset around and filled in the gaps. That meant moving all of her ranged attacks to one button and her melee attacks to another, rather than having it be distance-based like before. I then gave her the contextual melee attacks the other forms have, so a Rush Attack for distant enemies and a Rising Attack for airborne enemies. 

I also combined her Energy Blast Combo with her Energy Barrage into one input. Tapping the button uses the combo; holding the button now uses the barrage. Lastly, I incorporated the Perfect Charge mechanic into her Energy Barrage, so she can now quickly fire the maximum number of blasts by timing her release perfectly. Neato!

With Wolf, I gave him what has now become my favourite move in his kit: the Homing Attack! I think it's clear where the inspiration comes from, but I did make some changes to really make it his own. As I mentioned last month, you can charge the attack to drill into enemies a bit before knocking them up, and the charged version can also be combo'd into itself allowing for all kinds of shenanigans. You can check out what that looks like here.

I've still got a bit more work on Wolf to do, but I'm shelving it for the time being to work on other stuff. All of it is just polishing up his mechanics, so I still consider him "done" but it's probably just stuff I'll tweak here and there in my spare time over the next several months or so. I'll be sure to mention if I add anything SSStylish though!

2022

I spent pretty much the entirety of 2022 working on Arbiter's Transformation System. Arbiter is, in essence, a game about transformation, so realizing that core system to the best of my ability was extremely important to me in defining the game's identity. Now that it's finally in-game, I can safely say that I can't imagine Arbiter without it, so I think I achieved my goal.

We started with Wolf, the stylish speedster who's all about combos. He largely set the pace for the rest of the forms and helped me establish my workflow moving forward. He's lightning-quick and his kit is specifically designed to let you play with your food, so have fun!

Scarlet was next—our floaty, fluent, graceful, energy-blast-slinging queen! She represented some fundamental changes I had to make to the game's core movement system in order to fully realize my goals with her. We got there eventually though, and by the end she was probably the most unique feeling form by far. 

Third was Omen, the whip-sword-flailing berserker! Working on him was actually pretty straightforward, but the sheer amount of attacks I gave him definitely tested me creatively. I was so happy with how he turned out though, and I'd say he has one of the more versatile movesets compared to the other forms.

And lastly, ???. ??? was an incredibly creative challenge from literally every angle—animation, tech, visuals, all of it. The result is what I can only describe as the "perfect" form, having viable options for practically every possible scenario and doing so with style and grace (and spoilers!).

Each form was effectively an entirely new character, with an average of about 4-5 months of work from start to finish. Considering how fundamentally different their movesets are, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the game got a x4 multiplier to combat variety and depth. Quickly swapping between forms to build combos has become incredibly satisfying, and really does feel like the game's identity in a nutshell. All in all, I'm proud of my work!

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

One of the common criticisms I get (and it's totally fair) is that over the years I've shown basically nothing but combat within a variety of test environments. To that I say... I agree. Facts. That's correct. Completely true. Absolutely. You're right.

Believe it or not, I'm actually something of a Gamer™ myself. I wholly recognize that while action games need combat, they also need content, My omission of stuff like levels, UIs, NPCs, etc. isn't to say I'm never going to add them, it's just not something I've gotten to yet. It can be a little demotivating when people suggest otherwise, so I'd like to conclusively explain where my focus has been over the years just so everyone's on the same page. 

The game's been in development for around 5.5~ years, so I think it's as good a time as any to give a proper look at development over the years and where I've been investing my time. I think it would be easiest to first break down progress year by year.

2017: Pre-Alpha Proof of Concept Released, Pre-Production Started. Wasn't full-time until August/September.

2018: Pre-Production (Character & Enemy Design, Scheduling), Writing the Script (~30k Words), Lots of Prototyping/Finding the Fun, 60% of Enemies Modeled & Animated, Early Level Design Prototyping, VFX Viz Dev.

2019: Complete Gameplay Overhaul, Ashe Remodeled & Fully Animated, All Abilities Implemented, Additional Enemies Modeled & Animated, All Finished Enemies In-Game.

2020: Modeled ~70% of all NPCs, Modeled All Transformations, Revamped Ashe's Model. Development slowed down a bit this year due to COVID and some family health issues.

2021: Lots of Level Prototypes, Established Environmental Art Pipeline, Begun Production on Transformation System, Finished Wolf's Transformation.

2022: Finished Scarlet, Omen, and ???'s Transformation, Begun Work on UI.

In general, yeah, I've focused on combat a lot over the years. I don't think that's necessarily incorrect as Arbiter is a game about combat, but I can understand why it'd be a little concerning from the outside looking in. With game development, you'll typically be told to bring everything to a passable level in order to create a prototype that shows your goals for every aspect (gameplay, visuals, level design, sound, etc.) and I... actually agree!

The thing is, in 2018/2019 I committed the cardinal sin of what we game devs like to call scope creep. Basically, the smaller, original idea I had that could realistically be completed in a couple years grew into something larger. I started to see the potential of what Arbiter could be and decided to roll with it, feeling that if I didn't, I'd be releasing something mediocre compared to my peers. While that definitely tacked on several years to development, I can confidently say that I haven't increased the game's scope since, more or less sticking to my production schedule as planned in 2018. 

While I am absolutely the one responsible for how much work I give myself, I am still largely making Arbiter on my own. With that, I had to plan it out in a way that allows me to... well, finish. I found that for me, the easiest way to do that is to work on everything in bulk. It's tough to find a rhythm with programming, animating, modeling, etc. when you're constantly hopping back and forth between them. I found that I was able to get more done efficiently if I just committed to finishing one thing at a time, so spending 10~ months on modeling characters so that most of the character models are finished. Or in a more recent example, spending a year finishing the entire transformation system. 

In the case of levels, I was actually about to make them my priority in 2022, but I was given a grant that allowed me to work on the transformations instead. My grant was contingent on adhering to a schedule, and I wasn't confident enough in my level design skills to be able to predictably say how long it would take. With the forms however, they're mostly about animation and programming (which I'm much more comfortable with), so they felt like a better task to go for as I could more accurately predict how long they would take.

The forms really pushed me creatively though. While the result was incredibly rewarding, by the end of it I really wanted to work on other aspects of the game. Because of that, I'm going to give myself a little more leeway this year and work on the aspects I want to work on, rather than constraining myself to one thing at a time. I realize that goes against how I said I like to work in bulk, but I think I've reached a point in development where everything is starting to come together, so it feels a little more acceptable hopping between jobs now.

I've also just felt that while I have made some pretty good progress over the years, I want this year to be about making visible progress to show my supporters more clearly where their money is going. Level Design and UI are some good ways to do that, and I wanted to work on them anyways, so hopefully I'll have a lot more to show than normal this year.

Anyways, I'm probably more aware than anyone how long Arbiter's taking to finish. I'm a solo dev with the privilege of being able to treat this project as a 9-5 job, so I don't allow it to consume my entire life and free time just so I can finish faster. I think we're all acutely aware of how toxic crunch culture can be, so I'd rather enjoy my life as comfortably as I can while also getting to work on my dream game. If it ends up taking years to finish then so be it, but I appreciate everyone's patience in the meantime!

THE FUTURE IS BEST

As I've mentioned a few times now, my main focuses for this year are Level Design and UI. I've dipped my toes into level design before, but this year I'm planning to go all the way in on fully blocking out more or less the entire game. It's a bit ambitious, but since I spent a good chunk of 2021 establishing my level art pipeline, I'm excited to just dive right into building shit and finally turn this into a proper videogame. 

I'm gonna start by prototyping some quick ideas to solidify my traversal mechanics (fun stuff between encounters) and just really make sure that exploring these levels is genuinely fun. Once I'm done with that, I think I'll be hopping back and forth between blocking out levels and finishing up the remaining enemies so that I can fill in all the encounters. I'm also going to be doing a little more R&D to make sure I can build the full levels in a reasonable timeframe while still making them pretty.

For UI, I'm actually not too worried? I've made full UI schemes before and I have a pretty good idea of what I want to go for stylistically, so we're mostly chilling on that front. I've actually already started sketching the HUD, but expect tons of iteration over the year before everything's finalized. 

Here's a little preview featuring Gravity Dusty's Smokin' Sick Ashe Portrait!

Yes, the portrait covers  a bit of the health bar. Yes, there will be an option to hide it. But a true Arbiter would never let their health get that low anyways. 😤

CONCLUSION

I appreciate everyone's patience with this stuff. We're still at least a couple years out, but I'm grateful to all of you who've stuck around to support me. I'd like to ask for your continued patience in the meantime as I figure all this level design stuff out, but I'll be sure to keep you all posted as I do! 

I'd also like to give a quick shout out to Humble Games and the Black Game Developer's Fund! They have been nothing but supportive and have allowed me to more comfortably work on Arbiter without as much financial strain. The same can be said for all of you lovely Patrons, of course, so please know that I am incredibly grateful to you for allowing me to live my dream. One of these days I'll be sliding in here with a trailer and a release date, and I can't wait to share that moment with you all.

Cheers,
Jordy