The Info
Arakion is a group based role-playing dungeon crawler that pays homage to the classics while adding its own style with fresh mechanics. Lead a band of three heroes through a broken land, ripped apart by unknown forces. Explore a beautiful handcrafted world filled with crumbling dungeons, dense forests, ancient temples, and hidden secrets, all while attempting to build a safe-haven from the chaos.
How was Procore used?
The Procore suite is used heavily in the development of Arakion, whether it is creating large portions of the world with Probuilder, placing objects with Quickbrush or just making development easier with Progrids, the Procore suite has been critical to Arakions creation.
Key Features An homage to the classics!
Control a unique party of three heroes: A wide variety of races, professions, and traits adds great diversity to the way you solve conflicts
**A beautiful world to explore:**Arakion features a lovingly hand-crafted world of bright skyways and dark dungeons to challenge the craftiest of explorers.
**Strategic combat:**Quick decisions and deep tactics combine to create a challenging and rewarding combat experience.
With a focus on fun!
**No leveling up!**Arakion features a fresh take on the Role-Playing genre that focuses on exploration rather than killing everything in sight.
**Town building:**Build a town that YOU think would best fit this environment. A wide array of options allows you to put the focus where you want, on anything from farming to town defense.
**Release in Chapters:**Arakion will be released in a story format over three books and twenty chapters!
Pets! Some of Arakion’s wildlife is friendly - find and rescue these little critters, then train them and take them back into the field to wipe floor with the bad guys!
Have anymore questions?
Leave them in the comments below and I’ll respond to them as quickly as I see them.
Really like the aesthetics so far. Looking good.
A couple critiques -
The images of the characters on screen are cool. I always liked that - especially the beautifully animated portraits on StarCraft (?).
Is there a gameplay purpose the portraits are so large, and not framed?
I think if the player needs to be able to read the expressions and stature of the character by his facial features and expressions - this is a cool way to do it, although an icon or symbol could relay the same information easily.
IMO the portraits take up (only slightly) too much room on the screen. And because they are not framed like normal character portraits - the heads blend into the action (background) area. I think it would probably look more pleasing if the portraits were framed and a little smaller.
The model is nice quality as are all the others. On this character the texture does not follow the geometry pattern/flow.
The green arrows represent the flow of the geometry. The purple arrows represent the flow of the texture.
I think the flow of the texture should be altered to match the flow of the geometry.
The gameplay looks fun. Will keep watch on this to see how it turns out.
@theANIMATOR2b
Hey thanks for the compliments & critiques! I’ll have to look into Starcraft maybe I can do some emulation, you are right in the fact the characters blend in with the environment. I’ve tried to do a few things to resolve it such as making them brighter etc… I’ll look into a few more solutions today and do some additional frame testing. I was attempting to avoid framing to make a unique style, as such if you have any ideas that would use minimal framing I’m all ears!
In terms of the hair, I appreciate the image and pointing it out. So what I do is actually use detail normals to allow the player to pick various hair styles, as such I align the hairs UV vertically and what you’re seeing there is hair that wasn’t UV’d right and I hadn’t notice, thanks for pointing it out.
I was trying to think of something ‘different’ as I commented - because I thought you avoided framing for a particular reason, and you did.
Have you considered a subtle glow effect around the characters to separate them from the BG? Or maybe a dark shaded, semi transparent area roughly representative of the characters outline - just to provide some separation.
Rough Photoshop mockup. Left is a white outer glow, screen blend mode. Middle is a blue outer glow, screen blend mode, and right is a white outer glow, subtraction blend mode - which if available would look very interesting - maybe - but separates the character a little more without being overly obnoxious looking.
Note: I adjusted the levels on the right character also to add a bit more contrast for the shadows and makes the outer subtraction increase the separation.
As far as I know Photoshop layer effects are not readily available in standard Unity - but I’m sure there is a way to get these type of effects working.
I’ve tried something similar to your middle one (it was super distracting) but not the first or last. I’m thinking maybe a softly animated smokey style with the first or last may work. If I have time I’ll be testing that today then posting it up here for you to check out. In addition to this setup making the characters more visible I may be able to implement status effects directly into the background which would be fantastic!
In terms of the Photoshop blend modes it should be possible as long as it’s done right. I just have to be careful with keywords.
Here is a rough in game mockup of the new UI test (There are still some bugs and issues but it’ll give the general idea). The center character is selected, all characters share the same background painting (this may eventually be based on profession) that is softly animated.
