Arbiter - Monthly Recap - April 2023 (Patreon)

Morning gamers. There is no joke to be made at this time—this is simply a Tears of the Kingdom waiting room. I guess I'll talk about Arby a bit but who even CARES when Ganondorf is waiting for us looking like THAT. I simply cannot compare!

Architectural Anguish

I started this month by making a simple testing area with some of the new environmental assets. All in all that went pretty quickly and while the result isn't anything special (it's literally just a circle), it's more than enough to start showing stuff off again.

After that, I started learning about trim sheets. These are basically just textures layered on top of each other into a big juicy texture atlas. I've learned about them before, but I had to refresh myself since I've finally moved onto modeling architecture!

I've still got a ways to go with the more natural assets, but in keeping with trying to not get stuck on one thing, I figured it was best to move on for now. The trim sheets were thankfully pretty straightforward though and it's immediately obvious just how powerful they can be. It basically allows you to texture entire portions of a level with just a single texture, and obviously stuff like that is extremely valuable as a solo developer.

There's still some stuff I wanna add to it like hieroglyphics and whatnot, but for the most part I feel like I've got the concepts down. Next I'll be blocking out some assets to start putting these textures to good use! Yahaha!

Hop, Skip, and a Jump

Something I've started doing lately is capping off a day of environmental art with a bit of gameplay polish. My focus is still on the environments of course, but it's been nice to start chipping away at the little things that have been bothering me. Although what started as "little things" like bug fixes and general polish has turned into some larger reworks of controls and the proverbial Gameplay Loop ™.

One of the smaller features I've added is ledge hopping, which basically has Ashe hop off of ledges similar to traditional Zelda games. This is a pretty innocuous feature on its own, but it adds some style and character to an otherwise pretty mundane action while improving the feeling of platforming altogether. Normally he'll just do a little hop, but if you sprint off he'll do a cool flip instead!

(Of course the day I write this Sakurai releases THIS video)

A lot of stricter action games will actually prevent you from falling off the ledge, but in Arby's case we have so much control in the air that it's really not necessary. Ashe can double jump, air dash, ground pound, wall run, and teleport, so he's got plenty of ways to recover if he falls off a ledge. More often than not I've actually found myself trying to get off of ledges during combat, and the feature's done a great job at making that all feel fluent and fun.

Repurposed Abilities

Several months ago I also talked about reducing the overall number of abilities in the game, and one of the ways I planned to do that was by incorporating some of those abilities directly into Ashe's moveset. In this case there were two abilities I wanted to give to Ashe permanently; Warp and Transfuse.

Warp is a simple ability that lets you teleport either in front of or behind an enemy. Transfuse is a channeled healing ability that lets you slowly convert energy into health over time (think Hollow Knight). 

(These VFX are old, but they should convey the idea for now)

The game's controls were already pretty packed though, so finding space for these abilities without compromising elsewhere was a bit tricky. Ultimately I did find a really good spot for them (ironically right next to the normal ability inputs), but it took a lot of iteration to feel out what worked and what didn't.

The reason I consider this a pretty fundamental gameplay change though is because Ashe now has immediate access to both of these abilities (at the cost of energy). Previously they costed energy and an ability slot to equip, but now you can just use them whenever. Yippie!

There's two main reasons I wanted to do this: one was because they're both extremely useful abilities, and the other was because they didn't have any variation between forms. As transforming is part of Arbiter's core identity, I wanted to make sure that the ability variants felt meaningful and fun, but these two abilities are so utilitarian in their use that they really don't benefit from having variation.

So now they're permanent! This basically gives Ashe a consistent way to heal when he's out of consumables (assuming he has the energy for it), and a consistent way to warp if he needs to reposition. This also allows me to integrate warping directly into the enemy and level design, which just gives me a lot more to play with as a designer. Just the fact you can instantly close the gap between enemies or heal at any given time allows me to encourage much more aggressive gameplay all around, and I think it rounds out Ashe's options quite well.

Work Balance

In conclusion, I definitely think I'm gonna keep making little tweaks like this in my spare time. It's been super rewarding having this cushion of tasks I genuinely enjoy working on (and that just outright make the game better) at the end of a tougher day of learning the level design stuff.

There's still a lot of little things left to do, but it feels great sneaking them in with other work and I think it's done a lot for my mental health in terms of just feeling satisfied at the end of the day. I wish I started doing this sooner, but it is what it is!

At any rate, thanks again for your support everyone! Have fun with TotK!

Cheers,
Jordy