Let’s build some Titans in Drunken Robot Pornography

// May 16th, 2013 // No Comments » // DRP

What is a Titan, anyway?

Titans are giant robots determined to destroy the city of Boston. They must be stopped! (Or built. Pick one.) Here are examples of some Titans that players have built in Steam Workshop:

Let's build a Titan

You can use this blog post as a recipe and use this Youtube playlist to see the actual techniques in action.

Ingredients

• Cores – These form the base of your Titan. Destroy this, and you'll destroy the whole Titan.

• Arms & Extensions – 18 pieces that make up your Titan's general structure.

• Wings & Terminators - 12 pieces that help you build organic looking robots (dragons, etc.).

• Plates – 4 pieces you can place on your Titan's exterior, to help protect it.

• Decorations – Mechanical tidbits (because Titans like to feel sexy too).

• Jaunty Attire – Non-canon items such as tophats and monacles (beacuse Titans occasionally like to dress up).

• Weapons – 10 guns, including lasers, missile launchers, and pattern emitters.

• Huge – Sometimes, you want these especially-massive structures.

Left to right, top to bottom:

Recipe:

Step 1: Print Keyboard shortcuts

These are not essential, but may save you some mouse clicks and your Carpal Tunnel (don't ever say we don't care about you). Note, we do plan to update the UI before launch.

Step 2: Building a Titan base

Loosely, a Titan consists of a core surrounded by structural pieces, weapons, and decorations. To completely eliminate a Titan, you have to destroy its core, but you first have to pick off its extremities to get there. When you're designing one, your goal is to make that as challenging (and as fun!) as possible. First, pick a core (shown above) based on your vision for the Titan. Experiment away, and check out the Steam Workshop for inspiration based on what other people are doing.

Step 3: Add to the base

Select a mount point on the core and hit "A" to see available pieces (you can also click on the button at the top of the "Mounts" tab, but keyboard shortcuts are faster). Set a piece's health (you'll see the option when you select a piece and click on the "Pieces" button — protip: you can shift-select multiple pieces). A Titan's extremities will be easier to destroy than the inner ones — that is, until you destroy the extremities.

Hear Amy and Elliot describe how this works:

Step 4: Arming your Titan

Weapons are part of the piece they're attached to (the "parent" piece), and can’t be destroyed individually, though they do contribute to how difficult it is to destroy the parent.

If you're using weapon and shield banks (see below), we generally advise that you have the Titan stop firing while shields are up. From a gameplay standpoint, shields work best when an arena is built around their presence — if a Titan's shielded for 10 seconds, make sure there are things strewn about for the player to collect during that period. More on this in the videos on Arena building.

Watch Elliot talk about weapons:

Step 5: Giving Your Titan Personality

• When making complex, sexy, Titans, use multiple pieces (and types of pieces). More pieces = more explosions!

• Think outside the pieces: just because it's called "shoulder" doesn't mean it has to be a shoulder, nor does a "leg" only work as a leg – English is soooo one-dimensional.

• Some of the smallest pieces are the most versatile — spine, X-fork, joint, etc.

• Use reference images (Google image search FTW) for inspiration.

• Use shapes to convey personality: for instance, edgy, spiky things look menacing.

• Colors: You can color your entire Titan or individual pieces. Experiment with reflectivity and glow.

• Jaunty Attire — because why not!

Step 6: Animate that Titan

Give your Titan some extra life through movement. Check out this video:

That's it for today. If you've built a Titan, show it off by posting it in the Steam Workshop!

Ugly Baby: “Ear-to-ear-grin-splitting, head-bobbing, whooping fun”

// May 10th, 2013 // 3 Comments » // Ugly Baby

You guys made Ugly Baby awesome again!

…It's really shaping up, now–I mean, like, ear-to-ear-grin-splitting head-bobbing whooping fun, kind of shaping up. 

Well done. Keep up the badass upgrades, you sly MOTHERHUGGERS, you.

May 9th, 2013 — Ugly Baby Update — Waffles!

Are you hungry? Amy apparently wants you to be. What’s that, you say? Staying away from the carbs? Well, hopefully this update is just as delicious. 

 

GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE: Michael went all crazy with the UI! Brand spanking new graphics to tickle your eyes. He’s a perfectionist, so he says he’s not done yet. How do you think it’s coming along? What can you figure out from it? What doesn’t make sense? 

 

GAMEPLAY: A new stunt has joined buzzes and grooves, because they were getting lonely. Meet the NEEDLE! Can you figure out how to do it? Gameplay has changed slightly, so listen closely. Get near anything to buzz an object. Orient the world to your stomach (bottom of the screen), to groove. If you hit things, you damage your sensor. If your sensor’s damaged, you can’t do stunts! As your sensor detects stuff, you build up a score multiplier, so keep doing stunts! 

 

VISUALIZER: Dave’s research continues to pay off. Play level one with some fast/heavy music. Dubstep, Rock, Death Metal, EDM. That’s all I’m sayin’.

We’d like to personally call out, the progress bar feature in this recent update was due in part to a user suggesting it. I’m an awful person and can’t remember who did originally, so if it was you, thank you, keep ‘em coming! 

 

As always, tell us what you love, what you hate, and where you think Michael’s running off to next week. He won’t tell us. 

Concept Art!

It's been a while since we talked concept art for Ugly Baby, so let me break it all down.

Azumi Pentak is Ugly Baby's protagonist, and you'll get to know her in time. Ichiro and Jon are still working on her look and backstory. Check out some of Jon's illustrations:

Architecture:

We're also exploring city architecture. Jon drew inspiration from several different places (including overhead maps of landing strips) to come up with these shapes that may result in new architecture:

Building Paintovers:

Paintovers are a great way to explore new artistic directions before creating the 3D assets. As the name suggests, Jon grabbed some screenshots from the game and "painted" over them. What do you think?

The final step is to take the above and create an actual in-game test shot based on the above, as Amy did here:

Play Ugly Baby on Steam here!

New Art, Live-streaming, Building Titans and Arenas

// May 9th, 2013 // Comments Off // DRP

Another busy week of Drunken Robot Pornography means that we are a week closer to launch! In this blog post, we talk about some new art that Amy and Jon have been working on, but first, let's recap our latest Twitch stream:

#2 This week's highlight videos are made from the live stream. They are a nice way to see what's most interesting to you. Evetually they will end up on Youtube:

Even Ugly Babies Need Hugs

// May 3rd, 2013 // 2 Comments » // Ugly Baby

Our good friends at Zapdot and Hybrid Mind have been working hard on Ugly Baby. Ichiro continues to rest as evidenced by this picture from yesterday. This is most excellent news because a rested Ichiro is worth at least 3 times as many points as a tired Ichiro! This week we look at visualizers and also the in-game HUD that tells you when your stunts are X-Games worthy.

Visualizers:

We asked Dave from Hybrid Mind to tell us a bit about his work with visualizers. He shares his thoughts and a couple of videos that showcase his work. The visualizers will work in the background while you’re flying through a level to help connect the gameplay to music. Depending on the stress and beats-per-minute of the song you pick, an appropriate visualizer will be selected to match the audio experience. This means that the level will look drastically different if you play Enya, vs. Skrillex and this will happen like magic!

The first video shows four different EQ visualizers that Dave created. These could be used as is, as a standalone app for use at a party for example…or as the basis for more complex visualizers within the game. Dave: "Often I like to create some simple prototypes first to get things working and then mess with them a lot more to change how they work and what they do."

The second video shows some visualizers that were tuned for high energy electronic dance music or dubstep. As an experiment Dave integrated the visualizer into city level 1 from the current build.

In-Game HUD/ Stunt Scoring Interface

Port Wine, Live-Streaming, Drunken Robots and Ugly Babies

// May 2nd, 2013 // Comments Off // DRP

This week's blog post is brought to you by the letter T and the number 2! It has been a fun week for all of us over at Dejobaan. Ichiro is in Portugal taking a much deserved vacation. We are laying on the beach did our second live-stream on Twitch (more on that below) and we continued working hard on Drop That Beat Like An Ugly Baby, Drunken Robot Pornography and Monster Loves You. Did I mention that we are working HAAAAAAAARRRRDDD! But first Ichiro drinking port, because everyone should drink port!

TWITCH.TV — How to build a really fun Titan.

#1 Do this: Go check out our Twitch channel and follow us to catch next weeks stream live. It happens on Tuesdays at 2pm EDT/ GMT -4, and all episodes get recorded.

#2 We did our second Twitch live stream and focussed on Drunken Robot Pornography. The stream kicked off a multi-week series on building Titans and levels, and also featured a play-through of survival mode. We wanted to dive into the fine art of making Titans that are both pretty AND fun so here are a few pro tips from Amy: 

• Health: No matter how pretty your Titan is, it's important to set the health on each piece to make it fun to fight. You don't want your titan to fall apart at the slightest breeze, but you also don't want an indestructible fortress.
• Weapons: Weapons don't have individual health, so they can't be destroyed individually. Instead, they add to the health of the piece they're attached to.
• Shields: Be careful with shields, they can make the fight feel uneven or boring. You should probably stop the weapons from shooting when shields are on for fairness. Shields work best when the arena is build around the Titan having them. Give the player something else to do while the Titan is shielded (drones, powerups, another Titan)
• Personality: Don't use one piece when you can use three! more pieces = more explosions. Don't forget movement, this is a Titan not a statue! Use color and jaunty attire, because even Titans have a sense of style!

Check out the video below where Amy and Elliot explain these concepts in detail: 

Let's close out with some survival mode! We also did some of this in the Twitch stream so yeah, don't forget to sign up!

Drunken Robot Pornography Art Update!

// April 25th, 2013 // Comments Off // DRP

As some of you know, we have two really awesome artists; Amy who specializes in the 3D Modeling variety and Jonathan who illustrates digitally…with pixels… I figured we would loook at what they have been upto so here goes!!

Huge Titan Pieces

The robots in DRP are called Titans, not drones which to me says they must be MASSIVE! Here are Amy's latest huge Titan pieces. If you build Titans in the Giant Robot Construction Kit, you might get to use these soon! 

The Gun:

Amy has been playing with the textures for the gun. Here are a few that we looked at:

We almost settled on this one…what do you think?

Portraits:

And then Amy did these…

The first person who can correctly guess the largest number of people (Names and position the the grid) and email rshenoy[at]dejobaan[dot]com will get a copy of Monster Loves You . "Competition ends sometime tomorrow when I have enough responses"

The Arcology and GUI concepts:

Future Boston won't be able to use run-of-the-mill Google Maps so to help you find your way around the game we will have an arcology. Here are some early versions that Jon has developed. Which one do you prefer?

Also at some point you might die, yup…it happens to all of us! At that point you might see this:

I personally love Jon's GUI work but what do you think:

Titans:

And finally… some utterly ridiculous Titans and I mean that in a good way!

Viscerality in Drunken Robot Pornography

// January 19th, 2013 // Comments Off // DRP

Amy recently did a study on “viscerality” for Drunken Robot Pornography. That’s those little shaky, tilty, camera wobbly bits that make it seem like you’re actually physically there, instead of in a video game. Here’s what she had to say:

On Viscerality, in no particular order:

1. Impact on landing. In most games (and real life) you’d also die if you fell from the heights you do in DRP. Or just not have legs… but that’s ok, you have a jetpack! Portal actually doesn’t seem to have much for landing impact, either, though they probably explain it away with the leg braces.

Halo seems like as good a reference as any for this. There’s a slight dip when the player lands, other than that there’s not much for camera movement. The weapon actually conveys most of the movement (see #7).

2. Wind would affect jetpack travel, and most places this high off the ground would probably be a little windy. (No video, I’m not familiar with any other games that do high-altitude platforming.)

3. The player should be knocked back (and hurt) when hit by things– especially large, fast-moving things that have much more momentum than the player.

This is probably what would happen if the player was hit by a Titan:

4. Friction. It exists in the real world, and a moving platform (or titan) will not slide out from beneath your feet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP9fT8WrQ8c (2:00) : It is possible to stand on things that move and rotate.

5. The player is always upright. Related to #3, occasionally you may expect (in a giant rooftop battle between man and robot) to be knocked sideways or otherwise become slightly disoriented after being hit by the equivalent of a flying schoolbus. The camera could lean forward slightly when the player is running, if that doesn’t contribute to motion sickness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd1m5_n9P9w (starts at 0:34) : Portal has the same thing– why can’t you do crazy-cool acrobatics like this? Probably because you’d get motion sick and disoriented if that was done with a first-person camera.

6. Crouching/dodging. There’s a wall in front of me that’s 1.5m tall, but I will still get hit in the face by that missile because my legs are locked into the standing position. (No video, but there’s probably something in that Halo one from #1)

7. Using movement to convey… movement. Weapon bob when running (except when jetpack-gliding) and weapon bounce/slight idle movement, because most [human] people can’t hold a gun completely still even if they tried. Camera bob would happen if you strapped a camera to a real human being, but that probably just induces motion sickness in a game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwzaQCT9Hdo (from around 0:30-0:36-ish): from Sanctum, one of the only games where I could find someone standing still long enough to be able to point out the weapon movement out of combat– it kind of rocks gently back and forth like someone was holding it not perfectly steady.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx0gqCllnl0 : Metroid has a small amount of camera bob that doesn’t seem too sickening. Other than that, the arm cannon moves around a lot.

8. Weapon recoil– when we have the player weapon in.

Also notice other weapon feedback, like muzzle flash.

9. I think you can run just as fast backwards as you can forwards? Most people run slower backwards. Or faster forwards.

10. There is actually nothing indicating you are human. You never see your reflection or any body parts indicating your are not a robot. In most FPSs, there’s at least a gun and usually a hand or two. I’m vetoing the reflection thing though, because that would require a full model.

11. There’s also no indication that you’re at low health other than the initial warning– perhaps, as a squishy human, you’re winded, or there’s a life support warning on the screen. (I can’t find any videos of something like this because no one posts videos of themselves almost dying.) (Ed: Probably true!)

12. The player character makes no sounds. S/He doesn’t breathe, talk, or make so much as a peep even when s/he’s mortally wounded. (S/He might actually be a robot.) See Metroid video from #7 for human reactions to pain.

The most important thing to me is the weapon and how it moves to reflect the human wielding it.

That’s what we’ll be working on in the coming week or so.

An Adventure In Artsy Fartsy, with Jonathan Elliott, Part Two

// December 6th, 2012 // Comments Off // Monster Loves You!

Today we’ll be touring monsterdom and a few of its locations with a few of our native body guards. May I introduce:

Grishnak

Pufflescum

and Crushmaw!

They’ve been socialized, so they’re docile…for the most part. Please don’t touch the monsters, or…anything you see that matter. Here we go!

Your Hovel
This was the first completed in-game background, so it’s somewhat of a favorite child, being that it was one of the first times we were able to see the monster world. It’s also neat to explore what the inside of a “civilized monster’s” home might be like – what little knick knacks and whatzits a monster might have laying around or hold dear. Certainly not like the uncultured swine from Znak (shown later on our tour).

Morsel Vat
Next stop is the *reads list* Morsel Vat! How are monsters created? Like so! This was a fun piece, though most of the prelim design came from our narrative captain, Dan Brainerd. This is the birthing tub for morsels, which are infant monsters. It was interesting to think of the vats as pots of stew that have to be watched over, with ingredients added at just the right times. Also interesting is thinking of what happens if too much of an ingredient is added. Maybe that’s what the second bag is for.

The Wild Meadow
I like the wild meadow because it says a lot without a lot of detail, unlike most of the other backgrounds. It’s one of the last monster areas before the player reaches human civilization, so it has an odd, surreal calmness about it, sort of where summer vacation ends and the looming shadow of public school terror begins. Or, a pretty field, whichever.

Znak
Znak is a special place. It is one of the oldest monster towns, so old that residents have hollowed out husks of the oldest monsters to live in. It’s old. It also smells weird. Maybe the monster equivalent of going to your grandma’s house? Or maybe a village of outcast heathens. Hm…  Anyway, it was fun to create because it looks so much different that the rest of mainstream monster society and implies an interesting monster sub-culture.

Scrape Goat
It knows.

That concludes our monster tour! This wouldn’t have been possible without our noble guards so lets give them a round of applau…wait, nonono, no clapping. Crushmaw got excited last tour and….ate everyone. So, goodbye, ha! Ha. Get out. Don’t turn your back, just smile and walk backwards. Goodbyyyye!

Ugly Baby Signal Test 2 from Concept to In-Game

// December 5th, 2012 // Comments Off // Ugly Baby

Dave’s concept sketches turned into pieces turned into level design, using Michael’s Unity-side framework:

This happens when players start the level:

When they get more “signal” (the orange bits), the level becomes more complex:

Eventually, with enough signal, the level will look like this:

Yes.

Yonatan Does Coulton

// November 5th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

On hearing about the DRP alpha, Yonatan (whom you might know from the Dejo FB page) wrote us a passion-filled, heart-wrenching parody of the Portal 2 end credits theme:

It’s always such a pleasure.
Remember when I bought your games twice?
Oh how I laughed and laughed.
Except when I wasn’t playing.
Under the circumstances I’ve been shocked by their price.

I want your DRP key; give me…
That’s what I’m counting on.
I was Ichiro’s biggest fan
Now I think I’m liking John.

I was a lot like you.
Maybe not quite as crazy.
Now little Yonatan
Wants a key, too.

One day I’ll load it up,
And I might play forever,
It’s such a shame the game,
Is not quite finished right now.

You guys are really great devs,
That’s what I’m counting on.
You know why I write this,
Now I think I’m liking John.

Goodbye from your greatest fan.
(Oh. Did you think I meant me?)
That would be funny. If it weren’t so true.
Well I’m quite busy these days.
I barely have any time now.
But when I’ll get the key,
I might just come back again.

Go make some more games better,
That’s what I’m counting on.
I’ll let you get right to it,
Now I think I’m liking John.
Now I think I’m liking John.
Now I think I’m lik-ing John.