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Exploding Plants

26/1/2017

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by Fran Avilés - Designer
Hi !
I am Fran Avilés, Level Designer on Deep Rock Galactic. However, I am not going to talk about caves yet.
Every new element that we introduce in our game (or in any other game for that matter) needs 3 different kinds of intervention: conceptual design, technical implementation, and visual representation. That’s the case of a very simple (but effective) object that is going to populate some of our caves from now on: the exploding plant.
The specific behaviour was defined by the design team: it has very few health points, they regenerate over time if the plant is not shot, there is half a second of delay between the plant reaching 0 health and the actual explosion, and they can cause chained explosions. The artist created a model that could both communicate its function and fit the aesthetics of Deep Rock Galactic, while one of our programmers implemented all the behaviours.
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The plant now existed in our game and it was working as planned. However, games have to do an extra effort to communicate the states of all their elements. Game effects, particles, etc. have an obvious aesthetic reason to exist, but most of them are also there to let the player know the result of a certain action. You may think about blood coming out of the enemy after being shot in a shooter or the way in which Mario blinks while the effect of the star lasts. We were clearly missing that:
For the past two weeks, our artist has been very busy with other stuff and didn’t have the time to finish the implementation of the plant. This lack of visual effects was having gameplay consequences, therefore, even if I am not very experienced with Blueprints in Unreal, I knew that something had to be done as placeholder.
The material that the artist had created already had more than enough properties for our purposes. Just by connecting the health of the plant to the emission and to one of the parameters of the displacement function, the plant behaviour became more apparent:
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Dwarf Armor Setup

19/1/2017

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by ​Ronnie Ree - Animator

​My name is Ronnie Ree. I'm the animator on Deep Rock Galactic.
I want to show you a few behind the scenes images of the dwarves' armor.
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​Each character class will have very different armor or outfits.
Heavy characters like the Driller or the Gunner, will have big heavy metal armor outfits, for more protection.

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Other characters, like the Scout (also internally called the Navigator), will have a light outfit, so they can move around more quickly in the environments.
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The idea is to make the armor sets very customizable within each class.
So, the Gunner will have many different shoulder plates, helmets, and so on to chose from, that is only available to him.
The same goes for the other character classes.
Below you can see an image of the setup in 3ds max
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The intense colors are only for working, it makes it easier for me to see which armor part belongs to which class - it will look different in game.

I hope you enjoy this little blog post. See you underground!

​- Ronnie Ree / Animator
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Procedural Level Generation

10/1/2017

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by Mikkel Martin Pedersen - Game Director
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Hi, fellow Miners!

It's time for a Behind-The-Scene look at the procedural level generation in Deep Rock Galactic. First of let me explain something, that I think is easily misunderstood when using the words "Procedural generation". When we use the term, we are talking about procedural LEVEL generation - not WORLD generation - like what you see in Minecraft. Instead we have set out to procedurally generate cave-systems that will provide a strong FPS co-op experience for 30-90 minutes of shooter action and exploration gameplay.
But why procedural? Well, In order to create a true sense of exploration - every time you play the game - we need endless variation and we need the unexpected to happen - the crazy and odd cave constructions, that we would find it hard to design our self. Bonus benefit is that we as developers also have fun playing the game again and again :-)
The way we have generated the cave-system you see in the above video (Infested Chasm from Closed Alpha Build), is by creating a series of caves - level designed out of simple primitive shapes that the procedural system dress with a nice rocky surface and debris, stalactites and other geological details. Each cave also gets a random set of bigger features like pillars, crystals, gold, entrances and exits.
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Then these semi level designed caves are randomly chosen and connected with tunnels of various styles - small, tight, wide, enormous and so on. Infested Chasms is constructed like this with only four caves connected with tunnels  (avg. playtime=30 min). This may sound overly simple and straightforward, but the truth is that when you are deep down in the dark it is very easy to get lost - even with a level design that is basically pearls and a string (o-o-o-o). In the near future we are going to expand the procedural level generation and make it more advanced, but for now this rather simple approach has worked fine and has given us a good feeling of what we can achieve.

Until next time...Remember: Don't run out of flares - it's dark down there!
​

Cheers,
Mikkel Martin Pedersen (Game director)

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