Hi peeps, The Boredom Ministy is proud to take you with us on the little journey of the creation of "THE PATH".

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

We made the first iteration of the game for LUDUM DARE 46 game jam. We had 3 days to do it and finished it 10 minutes before the hard deadline.

We had so much fun working on it Grégoire and I, it went so smoothly from beginning to end and we were so happy about the result, its potential, that we decided to make a long, better version of it. A proper game this time. 4 days after the jam we're back at it transforming what was a snippit into something that is now 10 times bigger. We'll post here what we sarted with, our thought process, what we decided to improve upon and how we built it.

For the game jam version of the game we went for something simple with a square screen, dividing the ladscape into tiles for no particular reason other than for being able to decide what amount of different land we wanted the chicken to stroll through. Since every kind of land had a certain kind of traps and hurdles attached to it, thinking in section was making it simple to figure out.

We started with twelve tiles of land, each the size of the screen.

This was the base for the backgrounds, I would (if I had the time - since I had to work simultaneously on 2 freelance job during the game jam) add props on it to mak the backgrounds richer. I didn't have th time I wanted to dadicate to the props but we made do. he plan for the background was:

1. One square of base backdrop land

2. one layer of props and traps

3. one layer of eye candy (namely moving flowers for the most part)

4. Some shadow being cast on the square from some sort of vertical structure we don't see

5. A vignette that would both concentrate the attention like a soft spotlight on the heros but would also dim the background under their feet so the characters would pop out better in the frame.

6. on top of that a layer with the charathers and their shadows (shadows were additive between themselves at the time, now they blend thanks to Grégoire)

7. and, at the end if we have time ( which we didn't) was to add an extra layer of eye candy like smoke, and ash rain, that kind of thing. But we managed to add little extra deails like cigarette butts, and a few rad kill tin cans.

Every animation was super minimalist, literally 2 or 3 frames. And it worked pretty well for the most part. The chicken needs more work in erms of movement, but that was ok for the jam.

So we ended up with something looking like his very quickly :

Now that we knew where we were going the rest was JUST GET IT DONE.

SOOOO. Today here's what I'm doing today -- and what I've been doing for the past couple of days:

I've been doodling the 120 background panels of the long version of the game. I should be able to finish the basis tonight. The landscape will be varied from fields to cities. Now with that we can start adjusting the story, the events, the increasing level of difficulty and know what goes where, when it happens and how.

Thank you !

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

Hi everyone, The Boredom Ministy is proud to take you with us on the journey of the creation of "THE PATH".

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

We would like to push further the game and add several levels.

After 4 days of pixel pushing I finally got around to finishing the first stage of the assets for the long version of the game.

We now have 124 tiles of base background. This is just the underlayer. I now need to design the sets and little details that will serve the scenario by giving the right mood and to ultimatelly give life to the land.

Next step: flowers and vegetation.

Have a nice day everyone !

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

Hi everyone, The Boredom Ministy is proud to take you with us on the journey of the creation of "THE PATH".

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

We would like to push further the game and add several levels.

I started dressing up some of the tiles, added some more while I was at it, trying out some flower arrangement ad trying to get a feel of what the different areas of their little journey could have.

All that whil trying to retain a good read on the objects layedout on the screen.

Have a nice day everyone !

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

Hi everyone, The Boredom Ministy is proud to take you with us on the journey of the creation of "THE PATH".

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

Ok, so now we have most of the ennemies, I added some land tiles, and I started figuring out how all of it will fit together visually.

We both have talked about the game play and the behaviour of all the new elements. we've had some fun ideas. This is going to work.

Tomorrow, we'll concentrate on props... That's going to be a big one. Lots of stuff to design to dress the sets. Fun work too though.

Here are the new things we've got so far:

Have a nice day everyone !

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

Hi everyone, The Boredom Ministy is proud to take you with us on the journey of the creation of "THE PATH".

You can play the LUDUM DARE 46 version of the game here and don't forget to rate us !

We're working on a polished version of the game playable separately from the Ludum Dare version we made during the event.

I went easy yesterday, I managed the messy layers of my photoshop file so we would not waste time finding what we're both looking for through it.

I've continued making enemies and props, started thinking about the sets too.

It's going to take a while so to make sure I'm not forgetting anything, I made a long list of all the objects and features I want to design.

I'm slowly starting to get the hang of it and to find faster ways to draw sprites.

Have a nice day everyone !

You can play the LUDUM DARE 46 version of the game here and don't forget to rate us !

Hi everyone, The Boredom Ministy is proud to take you with us on the journey of the creation of "THE PATH".

You can play the LUDUM DARE 46 version of the game here and don't forget to rate us !

We're working on more sprites and levels to be added to the game. It will be a much more polished experiences, with new mechanics we are currently working on. We are done working on the sprites and the animation, and now we would like to make additionnal sound design to the game. Stay tuned for the upcoming release after the LD46 results.

Have a nice day everyone !

You can play the LUDUM DARE 46 version of the game here and don't forget to rate us !

You can now play our game if you use MacOS (was only available on Windows previously)!

:rocket: Play it now and dont forget to rate us ! :rocket:

Hello everyone :handsplayed: , i'm @gregoired, working on the code of our latest jam entry They Know We Know, a short narrative game fully built in Unreal Engine 4 where you play a person getting trapped in conspiracy theories.

Play it now on Windows or MacOs

I'd like to talk a little bit about our process with working on this game, basically the tools and the organization we had to rely on.

Working with 8 people remotely

I just want to first state that almost none of us work in the game industry, but come from other creative fields, such as VFX, CG etc... Some of us were a little bit knowledgable about Unreal Engine and were able to help others. I can say I'm pretty knowledgable about Unity myself, and this jam was a reason to dive a little bit about Unreal too. We also didn't have experience working together.

As covid is still a thing, we were working remotely, relying on Source Control and a VPN to be able to share files. A Discord channel was also setup, which was very helpful, to keep in touch and be able to stay organized in this short amount of time.

Source Control

Source control is the bread and butter of a organized workflow if you are a team of developers or just a solo one. It makes the process of sharing files and updates so much easier !

As I'm used to work on Unity (relying on text files) or Web based projects, I've never looked at anything but Git for my projects a a source control. Problem is Unreal Engine files are binaries, which make Git essentially useless outside of source code as it stores diff on text files. Solution was either to use another Source control, such as Perforce, which handles binaries in a better way, or use Git LFS which is a plugin for Git, handles binaries and is able to lock files on remote, like Perforce.

I've looked quite a bit into Perforce, but didn't want to dive in a system I didn't know much about, and it was not free for more than 5 users. So I decided to stick with Git. Two problems

• Git LFS with Unreal is still in Beta, and file locking is not supported out of the box, we had to use this plugin instead.
• Github is charging quite a bit if you use LFS, so I had to host the remote server myself. After quite some headaches trying to install Gitlab on my private VPS, I settled with Gitea which was much lighter and easy to install. It also came with a nice looking website interface, with tickets, projects, releases etc... like Github have. I recommand it for small private repo.

We had to set up a VPN to work on the same local network, in order to use Unreal Multi User editing tools for example (more in another postmortem), and access my small NAS storage, to be able to shares files outside of the source control. We took a little bit of time to setup the system for everyone, which was a little bit of a headache itself, but fortunately, everything was setup on Friday before the big day !

So what was the experience working with Git LFS+UE ?

File locking was working as expected. Only thing is to be sure to not use Git branches as LFS files are not branched, which was a little bit frustrating as I was used to use branches in a extensive way. Plugin was very slow though, as it tries to "check in" files for a good 30 seconds, before sending it to remote. The file locking/unlocking (or check out/check in) was not always safe as well, as we experiencied errors comitting files, as well. Best workflow to send our work to remote was to close unreal, stash changes, pull other people work, unstash, relaunch Unreal and finally commit through Unreal, to be able to unlock files. I definitly think the slow check in/check out could be improved, and also making it less error proof. I hope Unreal will pick it up again and continue working on it.

People were frustrated the first day, but went along with it and were able to work together, in different scenes because unlike Unity, Unreal make it very difficult to resolve merge conflicts.

We will talk about our experience working with Unreal Multi User Editing in a next post. In the meantimes, dont forget to visit us and play our game using the link below :rocket: !

Play it now on Windows or MacOs