It took us a while until we finally discovered who he actually is and how he looks like. When Matthias and Felix came up with the idea of Father the first time, they compared him to Morla, the old tortoise from “The Neverending Story”, sitting in some kind of nest located at the heart of the factory. But we didn’t have a real clue, how this would work out, until Hernan (one of our new graphics guys) did a quick sketch which he then polished. Maria finally did the 3D game model and brought this new character to life. She redesigned and animated the head and drew some really nice textures.

THEME A-1 Nightshift:

1. Level_01 Tutorial Move Controls & Basic Box Interaction: As Clark messed up his daily work he is now forced to do a nightshift. An overseer-bot commands him to search the basement for some machine parts and bring them back to the central conveyer room. The puzzles allow the player to learn the basic movement controls and to complete some simple tasks by putting heavy  boxes on switches.
2. Level_02 Tutorial Energy Flow: The second part of the nightshift tutorial  explains the factorys basic energy system. The player (hopefully) will understand how switches power susequent factory elements. Each puzzle is based on the major goal to connect the energy wires in order to activate the interactive elements of the next puzzle. Clarks actions power up the factory. The glowing energy wires serve as a guiding system and core game mechanic.

THEME A-2 Crazy Factory:

1. Level_03 Junkyard-Bar: As dawn approaches Clark enters the main production facility and receives his daily task. He is asked to visit the junkyard-bar where a drunken (broken) drone needs to be picked up. Unfortunately the way to the bar proves to be rather dangerous as the whole factory suffers from the carelessness of the partying worker-bots. Clark has to avoid all kinds of industrial accidents: hot laser beams, exploding drones …
2. Level_04  Drone Repair: The broken drone now has to be carried to the drone repair station. This makes passing through the dangers of the chaotic factory even more dangerous: Avoiding oscillating laser beams and solving spacial puzzles becomes more difficult as Clark not only has to protect himself but also the drone. Thanks god that this liddle bugger is broken and does not run around headlessly.
   
3. Level_05 Drone On Rails: Did I say, the drone does not run around? Well as it is now repaired it does … and the unfortunate Clark has to escort her to the drone socket room. The only way to achieve this task is to put the drone to an automatic guide system. As long as the drone has the right program it will stick to the rails and walk on a fixed path. However this path is not save either. Clark needs to remove certain dangers in time in order to allow the drone to pass.

SHUTDOWN: When Clark finally arrive at the socket chamber, he witnesses the arrival of  evil cleansing-bots. The Main-CPU has desided to make an end to the chaotic and inefficient production facility. All lazy drones and worker-bots will be exterminated and replaced. Wait, what about Clark?

We’ve been incredibly busy introducing new members to the team, writing guidelines and developing organisation tools. The project is more alive than ever, it’s just harder to tell from the outside. So apart from all this under the hood stuff, we’ve pushed CLARK’s game design further and filled in a lot of blank spaces on the map.

These images show mood sketches for the wasteland theme I did while the others weren’t watching (since I need to build about a ton of game relevant assets at the moment, doing scribbles like this was almost procrastination …)

Tell me what you think!

Cheers, Felix

Our current default perspective.

While exploring the gameplay we continously changed the position of our game camera. We noticed that in order to develop complex spacial puzzles we needed the player to see as much of his surroundings at a glance as possible. That’s why we dumped the more immersive third-person perspective close to Clark’s “shoulder” for an more or less isometric overview. We are now thinking to add some dynamic camera movement shifting close to Clark’s own field of view from time to time. This would be used for cut scenes or just moments of tense action. It might become quite a task to get the performance right though; at the moment we completely do without any occlusion culling, but that might become necessary in the future.

Very long time ago, very low camera …

(It’s really funny to look at these old images again. This whole endeavour feels like quite a journey already …)

Cheers, Felix

Edu, Matthias and I founded Golden Tricycle last October. We studied architecture together, gave seminars at university and know each other particulary well from countless overtired hours of this-rendering-needs-to-be-done-by-tomorrow-morning-3d-visualisation-jobs.

I am primarily dealing with the development of CLARK’s visual style, so I’ll be sharing information on the game’s texturing, asset-modeling and the tiny bit of character animation I know …

Very much looking forward to your comments and suggestions!

Cheers, Felix