Matt: The Fort is one of the first level layouts I slaved over after being introduced to the Ceasar’s Revenge level editor aka the Gamemaker GUI. It has a troubled past and had been in development longer than any level. They said I should let it go but I just couldn’t let my firstborn die. Instead it has been ripped apart and rebuild from the ground up. Constantly remixed through development and has changed vastly in its flow, game play and aesthetic.
The Roman fort or Castra are temporary sometimes permanent fortifications often built in the outskirts of the empire to control territories with overactive native populous. Often build out of local timbers and earthworks, these forts are used to house Roman legionaries and defend against the native uprisings that come with conquest of foreign land. Depending on the size of the force assembling, these forts they could be built incredibly quickly within a matter of days. This fort is located somewhere to the northwest of Rome in Caesar’s new Gaul or perhaps the wilder Britannia. Dark and dreary, damp pine forests surround the fort. It’s not the kind of place you would expect to find a senator, the likes of which spends his time usually lounging in warm Mediterranean summers. But those backstabbing rats will scurry all over the empire, try any hiding place, but there is no escaping Caesar’s Revenge. Woe are his betrayers.
Fort A the original level was a laggy, directionless, unbalanced and oversize-ed mess. Fort B is everything right with fort with the negatives stripped away. Certain elements were kept from the original design were retained while others completely overhauled (see below). I overlaid the map layout of both versions so we could get a clear look at what had been deleted; the most interesting part for me is the three separated parts showing the “deleted”, “salvaged” and “added” sections. What was salvaged is actually very little, more then 75% of the level was deleted and the only new volume added is a small new starting section (the top section of the blue), the rest of the new blue overlaps the purple salvaged section and adds to the level density with new enemy encounters, decoration and set dressing, rather than adding more scale. Despite the reduction in level size the density and additional gameplay makes up for the loss and the playtime to complete is significantly higher. This is all with a smaller cap on instances – instances are the objects placed within the Gamemaker room. The original Fort A had upwards of 6000 instances while the later optimized Fort A had 3000. The current new Fort B has only 1000. 1000 instances is our arbitrary limit, it serves as optimization for the sake of lower end machines and works towards a more limited level object saturation to aid in that old school stylishness.
Optimisations
Jordan: The early prototype stages of the game were mostly interior and felt much more like a dungeon crawler than what the project has become. One of the initial reasons behind this was to allow for aggressive culling and deactivation of objects – corridors and low roofs definitely have the advantage of obscuring more of the environment from the player. Fort is a good example of a larger scale outdoor environment that pushed our optimisation forward as there are a number of open area encounters that require a greater number of AI entities to be active. One way which we have approached this issue is by enforcing an internal object cap to give us a target to work towards. Additionally, the game culls any drawing of objects out of view or beyond the fog. As far as behaviors are concerned, the region beyond the player is deactivated and checked every 60 frames but only if the player’s position has moved enough from the last check to avoid updating unnecessarily. A hard deactivation at the fog distance would be noticeable and open to abuse so the threshold is further back out of sight. This makes for an interesting balance in that we are optimising to avoid moment to moment lag as well as that which comes with the update frame to recheck positions across the level. Right now everything runs smoothly on current levels though the real test will be when we do a proper pass for lower spec systems once we have gameplay and art in a final state.
Bellow is a call back to some concept art by Ivan from 2017 when first talking about the fort idea and a screenshot of a similar vista in the level.
Music
There are actually a number of tracks in the game already but this is the first completed one which I have felt was suitable to share in terms matching the style we are looking for. Inspiration has come from older thrash metal albums. There is certainly a lo-fi quality to the game in terms of its resolution and pixelated gore that is cohesive with early entries in this genre. I have intentionally gone for more of a dirty, gritty and piercing sound than an overly effected and polished approach which better suits the aesthetic of the game. This track incorporates a few ancient sounding instruments which is an area I would like to explore more in an attempt to reconcile 90’s metal with the Roman setting. Something I particularly like about this track is the driving pace as well as the contrast between melodic and dissonant elements. At some point it might be interesting to do a post breaking down whole the production process but for now here is the first released track titled after the Julius Caesar quote: “Alea iacta est” or “The Die is Cast”. It is said that this quote comes from Caesar as he marched his troops across the Rubicon into Rome in defiance of the senate – an act that would eventually lead to the demise of the Roman Republic – an apt title indeed.
Gaius Julius Caesar
Ivan: The production is plodding along behind the scenes, we have been looking into new weapons like the falx, making levels and talking about what other assets we will need in our post-Roman Republic future. At this stage, we have had a pair of floating arms wielding the deadly weapons and issue justice, but what we did not have was a model of the world first true dictator, leader, general, Gaius Julius Caesar. What else would signal excess on this project that is striving to be the paragon of pixel grit but a multimillion polygon 3d sculpt of our fearless leader? I present to you multimillion polygon Caesar.
This model will be retopologized and textured, most likely be used in the trailer and maybe reposed for some statue sprites. The head model itself peaked with 20 million polygons at one point. The head was modeled separately from the body has just been merged in. For some historical facts, Caeser was 5 foot 7 inches (170.18cm), by some accounts, his hair was brown as were his eyes. Considering our Caesar will be re-animated it will most likely be white head of hair and evil glowing eyes. Hope you guys like it.