Obscure Studios

Earlier today, a few people in a non-descript chatroom on the Internet asked me a few questions on what we do, and I answered, no holding back. Here’s the transcript, as promised!

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Q. How long have you been working on SHell?

A. SHell… I think I started it back in 2009. Me and some friends decided one night, “hey, we like games, let’s make the bestest one ever!” Or something to that effect. I’d actually had an idea in my head for a year or so longer than that, but 2009 was when I thought to myself “yeah, let’s do it”. Obviously the project stalled because I was a kid and had GCSEs and such, but since then I’ve grown up a bit and realise now the work that’s involved, as well as gotten more know-how.

Q. What made you start your own company instead of joining up with one?

A. Lots of reasons. Mainly control – this way, I don’t have higher-ups breathing down my neck telling me how to make this. When I’m in charge, I can make my vision how I want it. That’s not say I won’t listen to anyone elses concerns – it’s more that I don’t like having shareholders to please.

Q. How do you mean?

A. I think that rather than the aim being to make money, it should be to make fun. For me, money is just a bonus – if SHell sells copies and it’s enough to live on for a few years, that’s great and all, but what I really want to do is in 18 months, 24, however many months it takes to get SHell out there – I want to be walking down the street one day,or, more likely, browsing the net, and see someone mention SHell, and say they had fun with it. Games shouldn’t be about making money, they should be about the player.

Q. You’re a completely new, unproven company with no track record. What makes you think SHell will sell at all?

A. Truthfully, nothing! If I could, I’d release it for free. However… making a game is difficult, especially when it’s just me working on the code. I’ve already spent a good couple of grand on stuff to help – almost £1000 on Unity Pro, at least 5 times that on Coke… if I can sell a few copies and get back what I’ve spent of my own money, that’ll do me nicely, and is at the top end of what I expect.

Q. You’re the only developer?

A. Yep! I wish I had more people helping, but it’s hard to find people I trust who are willing to work for free. I’ve had a couple of friends ofer to help out, but so far I’m the only one who’s given real, tangible progress.

Q. Will there be tits?

A. Oh yeah. Birds are pretty resilient things. Oh, wait, that’s not what you meant, nevermind.

Q. Have you considered kickstarter?

A. Yes, but it’s not something I want to do, really. If people give me money and the project doesn;t get finished or is bad for whatever reason, I’d feel like a conman. SHell has been self-funded so far, and it’ll probably stay that way.

Q. How will SHell be distributed?

A. If Ican, I’d love it to be on Steam. It’s a wonderful platform, and Valve are pretty good at making it work for developers, so I hear.

Q. If a company offfered you a job but they own SHell, what would you say?

A. It depends on the company. If it were EA, or some other big publisher like that, then no, their philosophies are terrible and I disagree with them. If it were Valve, or another Indie company… then I think I’d consider it, because they’re pretty good at giving you creative control. In short -  can I make the game I’ve wanted to?

Q. Were you inspired by the success of Minecraft?

A. Yep. Honestly when I first played it I thought it was boring, but maybe had potential. I wasn’t too hopeful, really (sorry Notch!). But then it evolved and I heard people raving about it, so I looked it up. I think I bought it about Alpha 1.3 or something. But seeing how successful it became definitely inspired me to finish my old projects.

Q. Can I help with the project?

A. Sure. Do you know your stuff? Are you a good guy? Can you play L4D2 with us for kicks? If so, hit me up, I’ll probably have something for you.

Q. How can people contact you to ask questions?

A. Send me an e-mail at ben@godlike.me.uk. I read everything and usually respond if your grammar is good.

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And that’s that! Feel free to send more questions in for the next Q+A!

One of the main aspects of SHell we wanted to expand on is exploration. The landscape should tell a story, the people and places in it, small details – the world needs a story beyond Sarah. But if we’re going to explore, we need a big, big area. This is where a bunch of codey nonsense comes in, because we’re lazy!

First things first, we needed to decide how big we were going to make the explorable area. One of the visions for the game, originally, was to have huge expandable areas that we can build on in patches – something we still hope to do – but an initial area for the bulk of the game to take place in is needed. After rolling some dice, we decided on a 20km by 20km area – over 400 square kilometers. This is a respectable size, but posed a new problem – mapping.

400 kilometres of terrain is a big undertaking, and I had to have a little think about how best to do it. If we break out the paintbrush, it’ll take months. And then, we looked to another indie game for inspiration. Minecraft generates a game world on the fly using a set of algorithms, and in the earliest versions, a technique called Perlin Noise was used. Minecraft can have maps eight times the size of the Earth – how would it scale here? To find out, I threw together a quick script and ran it on our terrain. The result wasn’t too bad, a  nice, mountainy terrain for the player to explore. But now texturing would take ages. A few adjustments later, and I had a basic texture kit built in – hills would be green, and lower down bits would have a rocky or road texture. While not perfect, it definitely saves time later on. After a playtest though, something felt… off. Looking in the editor, mountains looked too fresh, too perfect. I realised what I’d forgotten to do. Erosion.

I decided to modify my terrain generator script with a few more additions. There are four main types of erosion that I know of that can make any reasonable impact on a terrain – Thermal, Wind, Tidal, and Hydraulic. In laymans terms, Thermal Erosion is where the temperature of the ground/material changes, Wind Erosion is where the wind carries particles that chip away at the rock or cause small particles to blow off, Tidal is where the sea or bodies of water acffect it, and Hydraulic is, simply put, rain. Since SHell takes place in the mainland, I didn’t bother running a Tidal Erosion, but I coded in a rough simulation for us to exand on later. Thermal, Wind and Hydraulic Erosion however, were done. Thermal Erosion has little effect in general, and the effects are’nt too noticable. Wind Erosion caused much more fascinating results though. I ran about 100 iterations of the script, using random variables for wind strength, direction, etc. This simulates the changing direction and conditions wind would have on a landscape. It made some pretty interesting patterns on the terrain, which we’ll be incorporating into the game. Hydraulic erosion also changed the playing field a little, creating nice little craters the player might find things in, and also made me die on spawn because the terrain had dropped about 100 metres. The end result looks like this.

This is a small amount of the total work we’ll be doing on the map – landmarks, cities, texturing etc -  but we felt you might like a little insight into how we do things.