Author: Joe. C
TimeRivals

Time Rivals Weekly Dev-Log #3

Welcome back to the Time Rivals Weekly Devlog! This week at Studio 316, we’ve worked in all corners of the Time Rivals world: character, map, systems and more. Let’s jump right in!

The Rivals

Darkness Calls

Last time we had a devlog we showed you our speedster Shutter – now it’s time for a Rival a little slower and more methodical. The Matron is a macabre and creepy machine discovered by the Showrunner in a mysterious monolith buried in the Arctic. 

Taking the form of a nun and draped in dark garb covered in strange and occult symbols, the Matron hovers over the battlefield and uses a group of unique sharp black shards to attack with. These ‘dark shards’ can either be used to impale opponents and deal direct damage.

Her ability adds a little extra depth though – any shards that the Matron misses will embed into the ground or walls and can then be detonated to create small AOE damage bursts. Consider wisely how you use The Matron’s dark shards: for one on one combat or to lay traps that you can detonate to kill clusters of enemies?

Here’s a refresher at how her shooting mechanics work in-engine! 

 

Our 3D artist Rob has been at work creating the Matron’s model, take a look at how the frightening machine will look when you face her in the Arena!

Introducing the GooBot

Matron aside, remember Goobert? Designer and artist Jamie has been continuing to develop Goobert in-engine, creating his signature goo gun and ability. His goo gun sprays puddles of corrosive, toxic goop over the Arena and deals damage over time to any Rival stood in it. These puddles grow the more goo is added to them, and the larger the puddle, the longer it’ll take to vanish.

This means Goobert is excellent at denying the opponent area control and blocking off sections of the map, perhaps to ferry them into an ambush by Shutter or a Matron explosion. His primary weapon is backed up by his ability, one we’ve fondly nicknamed the GooBot. The GooBot can be placed down by Goobert and will slowly rotate on the spot, its field of view indicated by a glowing cone in front of it. If it sees you, get ready to run! 

The GooBot will track you down, following you up stairs and around corners, determined to get close enough to detonate and unleash a large pool of goo that will also briefly slow you down. This means chasing a Goobert can be risky, as he can use the GooBot to get a quick advantage in battle if he has it charged – or deploy it more strategically to ambush enemies off of points.

Check out Goobert and the GooBot’s gameplay below! 

Clone Wars

The Clone Pod is the most important piece of equipment for a wannabe Rival. The Clone Pod is what’ll give you the opportunity to use spawns strategically and turn deaths to your own advantage, so it’ll be up to you to engage with Clone Pods and form your own unique tactics for outplaying other Rivals.

The Clone Pod can be thrown and ricocheted off of walls and hard surfaces, tossed through windows and over buildings, and will always activate as long as it lands within the playable space. When it lands it’ll display a small hologram of the Rival that placed it to alert friendlies and enemies to who could be appearing there any second. 

Here’s a look at the Clone Pod toss and how it looks ingame!

On Location

We recently purchased an asset pack for our first level to help us get it looking good for playtesting. Check out the effect below! In time, we’ll be creating our own assets to fill the level with a certain Time Rivals twist, but until then we’re more than happy with this!

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On The Next Episode…

Next week we’re hoping to have gameplay for every character done and dusted. We’re running an in-house playtest tomorrow, playing each of our unique Rivals and seeing who comes out on top. Which Rival do you think will take the crown, and which dev? (me, obviously.) 

See you next week!

 
TimeRivals

Time Rivals Weekly Dev-Log #2

Welcome back to the Time Rivals Weekly Devlog! This week at Studio 316, we’ve continued to expand the systems and world of Time Rivals. We have exciting progress on another Rival to share with you,  and some previews of more to come!

The Rivals

Quick as a Flash

Last week we brought you Goobert, the chemical scientist who returned from the past thanks to the Showrunner’s technology. This week we’re focusing on his polar opposite, who we teased a little last week: Shutter, the overwhelming and quite literally blinding fast Rival who comes from our present. 

 Shutter is an ex-Yakuza member who retired for a quiet life in photography, but when the Showrunner arrived to recruit him Shutter could not resist the kind of photo opportunities a time-travelling TV show might present to him. Shutter picked up his trusty SMG once more to leap into the arena with and didn’t look back. This week we’re giving you a closer look at the Rival – his concept, the continued work in progress of his model, and his unique gameplay.

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Here’s a look at Shutter’s gameplay too! His primary weapon is his SMG, which we’re planning to make a simple, consistent DPS option that will be easy for everyone new to the game to pick up and play around with. It’s harder to balance than you’d expect – we have to consider fire rate, bullets to a magazine, spread and of course damage per bullet. 

Our designer Tom has been working on Shutter’s gameplay, and here’s how the SMG works in game thus far. We also have Shutter’s own unique ability figured out and being worked on – a flashbang effect that Shutter uses a camera to perform (here represented by a white box), in fitting with his character. Here’s a clip of the first iteration in action! Remember, these are works in progress, and things will definitely be more polished up when Time Rivals releases.

So who’s up next? All we can say is, something wicked this way comes. Take a quick preview of next week’s focus, the mysterious and frightening Matron. The Matron will fire shards of concentrated dark metal, penetrating right through opponents and causing concentrated explosions with any missed shards. This prototype was created by Joe, and we’ll have more to share on the Matron next week.

On Location

The first multiplayer arena for Time Rivals will be set in a scenic riverside town inspired by the likes of Venice. The water will serve as the main arena hazard, where the canals strewn across the map can be used by canny players to quickly take advantage of their placed Clone Pods, dying and quickly respawning at a point of their choosing.

We’re still in the process of developing our map, and with the constant changing and iteration of our characters we still have to playtest with these changes in mind. Regardless, here are a few shots of our blockouts. Tom has been working on the blockout for testing, thinking about different gameplay styles and sightlines. It’s always good to have options! 

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On the Next Episode…

Next time we publish a weekly devlog, we’ll have more to share with you on the mysterious Matron, our next Rival for the pipeline, and some more nitty-gritty mechanical work that shows you how each Rival will play in the Arena.

See you next week!

-Time Rivals Dev Team

 
TimeRivals

Time Rivals Weekly Dev-Log #1

Welcome to the Time Rivals Weekly Devlog! Every week from now on, Studio 316 will be making an effort to bring you all the news and updates to do with our upcoming game, Time Rivals. With that in mind, we have a lot to catch up on. Time Rivals has been in development for quite some time now, and we have been through a lot of iteration and progression as a team. 

We’ll be catching you up with past versions of Time Rivals and letting you know all about the present state of the game, while outlining our plans for the future too. Let’s start with what’s going on right now, though.

The Rivals

Goo-d to Go
Obviously the focal point of Time Rivals for us is our roster of characters. While we’ve been through a few ideas in all our different versions of the game, we’ve settled on our characters now and the work on their models, animations and gameplay has begun in earnest. Some are further along the pipeline than others, but all our artists are making great progress on our roster.

With that in mind, meet Goobert: the mighty mecha scientist who’s gameplay focuses on area denial with his corrosive goo weapons. This Rival was plucked from the past and given a new body by the Showrunner to bring chaos to the Arena, and his model was completed this week! Check out these screenshots of Gooberts development and final in-game look courtesy of our 3D artist and programmer Jamie, as well as the original concept made by Sam.

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We look forward to sharing some Goobert gameplay too. His huge stature is sure to make him a big target in games, but we’re working to give him the tools he needs to take out his opponents. His ability, a tracking goo drone, will allow Goobert to get the drop on enemies around corners and open a firefight with his unique damage over time goo effects. 

And while he’s not quite ready yet, enjoy these glimpses at another Rival on our roster. Shutter is currently being worked on by Khris, another one of our 3D artists. While Goobert’s weapon isn’t ready yet, Shutter’s trusty SMG has already been modeled and prepared for animation! We’ve also got a preview of Shutter’s model for you!

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We’ll have more to share on Goobert, Shutter and the other Rivals in due time!

Temporal Relocation

Time Rivals, as the name implies, will take our Rivals through time. Pretty simple, right? While the idea was exciting, we had some difficulty in figuring out how we should go about giving the actual feel of time travel in the game. We could have maps based on different time periods, sure, but it doesn’t give you the same excitement of actually moving between those time periods yourself. We played with ideas of portals in the sky, camera drones following you around and a giant floating arena, but all of these seemed outside the scope of what we could do in our Tranzfuser development period. 

We recently settled on an idea we all liked. Rivals won’t start battles in the Arena, but rather a prep room where they prepare for the battles ahead. A portal opens up and whisks you away to the Arena that’s been chosen for your game. Our VFX designer Joe created the portal’s first iteration this week, and is here to share the process.

Joe: The portal system is a simple single blueprint class in-engine. It’s as simple as one object acting as the portal, and another smaller hidden in-game object to reference a ‘spawn’ point. Once the player overlaps with the portal object, their location is updated to the position of the ‘spawn’ reference object. All the movement is replicated on the server for multiplayer so other players will see you teleport. There is also a simple post-process material which fades in along a gradient with a linear noise base texture, using a timeline in the blueprint to control the material fade. This post process material will likely be updated in the near future to be more fluid. 

The visual effect is a simple Niagara system which uses 4 emitters and a material shader. There is a simple black particle projecting onto a plane rotated to be vertical in the centre, along with another plane mesh emitter which has the material shader projecting onto it. The last 2 emitters are both simple GPU rendered particles, spawned in a torus location with some forces and noise applied to get the desired swirl. 

Here’s how the effects look in action!

On Location

Joe and Tom have been working hard on level design lately. Now that we’re implementing clone pods into gameplay more regularly, and making them throwable, we’re having to think a lot more about our map design. We’re plotting out strategic places to throw your respawns, choke point locations that you’ll have to fight your way through to get to your objectives, and hazards you can use to kill yourself and immediately respawn at a clone pod of your choosing. 

All this is a lot to think about, so we’re focusing on making blockouts for our level rather than going directly to building our modular kit. We have a theme in mind for the level art and for where exactly we’ll be sending Rivals in our first map, but we want to be sure it plays well first.

We’re not entirely settled on our level yet, but we can promise we’ll have something to reveal next week regarding where the Rivals will be travelling to in our first season.

So what’s next for Time Rivals?

On the Next Episode…

Next time we publish a weekly devlog, we should be able to share another new Rival in progress, along with gameplay of our new systems like the clone pod throw in our new map blockout. We’ll also be adjusting the way our new characters play, and explaining some of their unique mechanics and abilities to you over the weeks to come. We look forward to sharing the process of developing every Rival and all our interconnected systems, and going through the iterations and improvements together. 

See you next week!

-Time Rivals Dev Team

It is pronounced “Three-Sixteen”

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