Project Duality

So the Old Watermill has taken a wee bit of a backseat to Project Duality for the time being.  The team has gone from just James Harris and I to James Harris and I + five and its really starting to take off.  We still have a long way to go certainly, but some major breakthroughs have happened and I wanted to document them here.

A brief synopsis of Project Duality quoted from our description on LinkedIn:

"A 3rd person bird's eye view Action/Adventure RPG in which the player explores two parallel worlds - phasing between both at-will to solve puzzles, combat enemies and bosses, and progress through levels.  Combat mechanics and art style is inspired by the classic Mana series that spanned from the SNES to the original Playstation and is very near and dear to our hearts.  This project will be a long work in progress and meant as a portfolio piece to showcase the teams talent and passion."


To date we've made 2 major breakthroughs:  Camera mechanics and production pipeline process.  Camera mechanics was our first major breakthrough and led to discovering our pipeline.

Originally we started with an isometric view with the camera centered on the player and this made the game feel completely removed from the Mana titles we are attempting to pay tribute to.  Our level development also felt very wrong -- Duality was becoming more like a tribute to Diablo or Baldur's Gate II (neither of which are bad mind you) and less like our beloved Mana games.

We went back to playing Secret of Mana and Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken Densetsu III) to regroup.  We discovered that these games, being 2D sprite based, are set up in grid chunks in which the camera is mostly on rails and advances only when the player breaks a threshold of screen space as they move forward through the level.  The camera doesn't follow the character as much as reveals the map as the character progresses and does not break the boundary of the level.  Example below:

So this led us to the idea of building our levels in square tiles and locking our camera to the level and advance only when the player breaks a certain threshold of screen space.  As we are building this game in Unity Engine and default units is in meters, we opted to build levels with 16x16 meter chunks with a level specific naming convention.

Which brings us to our pipeline process.  Being as we were now building levels on a square grid and that 16 is a power of 2, most of our future work is already simplified.  Texturing and maintaining texel density is a matter of division and asset scale and placement is extremely simple.  We also created a PhotoShop template with a 16x16 unit grid setup so all they have to do is draw a floor plan and export the .jpg to me and I can plug in the modular and custom assets accordingly.

Lvl1F1T1 floorplan jpeg from level designer

 Import to Maya

Extrude and create modular wall pieces

Place walls and ensure everything fits; adjust level floorplan as needed but maintain exit locations

Create environment assets from asset list

Plug in assets

This is the first floorplan of the first level and now that the modular assets are built, the rest of the level chunk iterations take a VERY short time to compile.

As of now we have 4 level chunks completed and this is enough space for our programmers to begin building the AI and combat systems James has designed as well as create and test our camera.  James has been focusing on updating documentation, organizing the team, and designing the elements our programmers need to get some testable gameplay going.  It will be a while until he can work on floor plans for the rest of the level and in the meantime I will be focusing on building tileable textures for the walls, floors, and environment assets.  I'll post progress on that front soon!