Weaving Tides is an isometric singleplayer adventure game for PC/Mac set in a completely woven world. As a human child you befriend and ride the weavers which are dragon-like, flying creatures with an endless ribbon tail. Along the way you will use the weavers’ unique stitching styles to overcome torn up areas and quirky creatures. Weaving Tides is currently in development and will be released early 2020.
Follow the Feathers
After Yokaisho and NIVA this is our first commercial project - if you want to stay up do date you can visit our Blog or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.
Behind the scenes
One of the latest additions to our game was the so called yapper. Yappers are small dogs that can bite you if you get too close:
I was responsible for rigging, animating and implementation into unity. But let's start at the beginning, with pen & paper. Thinking about the gamedesign, taking notes of new ideas and figuring out how to actually code a specific behaviour is a crucial first step:
Every problem or wrinkle that can be identified on paper saves a large amount of time later. Iterating on an idea is always better than to refactor something that is already coded. Speaking of coding - here you can see a very early gameplay prototype of two yappers:
For prototyping things like that I work with a unity plugin called playmaker - it's really fast and flexible once you get used to it. There are some powerful built-in functions that make life a lot easier. For example if I want one object to follow another I can hook up a few existing actions to do exactly what I want. This is how it looks inside unity:
How it all began
Well, to be honest we have known each other for many years now, so it's not really the beginning but more of a nice side-story. Before founding our company in Vienna we were living together in a temporary airbnb flat. We did this to get Weaving Tides going but we also wanted to see if our plan would work out, and luckily it did!
So back to topic: imagine a flat that does not have any kind of electronic frills like a microwave, computer or even television. We felt so bad turning this nice and cozy place of harmony into a whirring development hell: cables zigzag the floor, screens blink in dark corners and the walls were papered in Ren's concept art (this was actually a good thing).
And this is my personal highlight: our programmer Michi was working at a table in the child's room that worked surprisingly well as a stand-desk: it had this extra wooden board you could conveniently flip outwards. After using it for a few days and praising it regularly for its comfort we realized that this table was a diaper-changing table:
In german we have a word for this kind of table: "Wickel-Tisch". And another word for programmer is "Entwickler" - so you get the joke. It was so funny that our Entwickler is working on an "Entwickler-Table" xD
early prototype
During this time we worked hard on the base stitching-mechanic and we tried out many different approaches. Here are some pictures that illustrate that process:
That's all for now! I am already working on new posts for some of the other mobs, so stay tuned ~~~»}