Kingdom of 12 Doors - Mobile adventure light RPG

Kingdom of 12 Doors is a real time 3D rendered adventure light RPG currently in development for mobile devices. We're starting to lean the graphics towards a Don Bluth style, though we're not entire sure what it will end up as it's still very early. We have open world running smooth, but we really need to finish building the entire Dune area to get a handle on the memory consumption and download size: we are at this time using small textures 256X256 and 512X512, so it's highly possible to see a massive graphics boost once we finish the Dune.

Now I've been saying it's an American style light RPG minced with a Japanese style adventure, but in all honestly I enjoy Elder Scrolls and I enjoy Zelda: from a game play perspective it's somewhere between the two. Now, this is a full game and we're trying hard to get corporate funding to create a high level version of the game for either one of the consoles or steam- it won't happen without funding.

Heres a somewhat old video which is a simple and clean overview of the game.... I'll try to get a new video soon, the game keeps evolving...

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Some of the newer graphics below.

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I can't wait for more people to find out about this game. I am really excited to be a part of this project.

 

Very unique style and the gameplay looks interesting also. Keep it up!

 

Thanks

 

very refreshing to look at!

 

looks very cool and creative! How may polys is your level/background pushing if you don't mind saying?

 

We're pushing approx a quarter of million triangles per view, the characters take a good size chunk out of that though.

 

Congrats for a really good mobile game.. Unique and really cool.. Though the graphics need an update, dont you think??? Some more textures would do the thing..

 

Yeah your right, there's no assets yet either. I have to finish the game play, layouts and big stuff first - then I can get to the little things. Other wise the game won't get done.

 

So the black knight is the first big battle of the game and ushers the player into the actual world beyond the tutorial. The black knight is a mini boss which means he doesn't have a specific weakness but he has considerably more advanced AI then a regular enemy. Speaking of brains, I'm currently coding him some - with any luck I should have a video mid week, after which I can start cutting into the real meat of development.

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You've probably noticed these characters are a bit heavy on polygons for mobile devices. We're trying out a new method for optimizing our characters. So far we've been able to push our character polygon limits by 20 times.

 

When fighting tougher battles or during story moments and scenarios, Siouxsies fairy will materialize to physical form. The physical form is considerable less expensive than carting around a dynamic light(the fairies standard mode), so we may be able to integrate the human fairy into a larger portion of the game. I will try to get a video of the battle up soon.

As a side note, we're moving into the world now. We have eliminated loading times which wasn't a huge stretch. What this means is that there are no levels - the adventure is one seamless game play experience as it stands now. What we're looking at next is opening the world for some explorative game play, but until I've built a large enough map I have no way of knowing if it can be done while maintaining a high enough quality of graphics - theres a ton of polygons to balance for landscapes. This will take a few weeks to figure out.

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Here's the actual skirmish with the Black Knight on video. The characters and animations will build up with time and we still don't have a full GUI or custom music. Siouxsie got a bit of work in the shoulder area, she's going to get some more work on the top side soon.

I've also put this video up on the original post.

 

wow amazing work! This looks fantastic visually. I cant wait to see it running on mobile devices

 

Thanks snow. This is the iPad mini version here, or at least everything is tested on the mini before published. I'm looking at the world mechanics now to try and open it up a bit - I need a couple weeks for that but I can shoot the next video right off the tablet I just need to get a screen or find a method so the graphics are crisp.

 

Oh. We have blood and smoke(for the magical enemies) but I never thought about sparks for metal armour - that's actually a very cool idea.

 

We have the open world manager working and everything seems to be OK but in all honesty we need to finish a sizeable chunk with full game play to test memory consumption and total download size of the game. There are three large areas that are interconnected with the labyrinth. The first area is a sandy, mars-like environment. The first image below represents roughly how dense we're going to be able to go with the open world graphics, we don't know yet how far we can take the textures - light maps take quite a bit of memory and there's going to be tons of them, we need to finish the entire first area to gauge what we can do with textures. The interiors are interwoven with the exterior so there is never any loading after the game starts with exception to saving or loading a saved game.

The images below are from iPhone 5 which turned out to be massively more powerful than the iPad Mini. We ended up activating real time character shadows and still have yet to hit its limit, and thats with full combat as well. We've also started to evaluate the character designs and are working on enhancing them.

We're going to be working on the dunes for some time and I will try to get more images up as we complete them.

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I keep forgetting to post concepts in this thread... Here's some potential enemies for the dune, a replacement enemy for the original flyer, and maybe one of the heroes mounts.

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Very nice game. Looking forward to see how it'll end. One question. On the girl's skirt, how did you animated it to be so smooth/fluid? Was it weight painted with the leg or was it animated using a bone?

 

The skirt has 6 bones and the parent is the hip bone. The legs are animated first and then the skirt is animated after.

 

Thanks! That's very helpful. One last question and I'll be satisfy. Since you are making it for mobiles, is the terrain the Unity built in or did you guys model that from another program and import it into Unity?

Thanks!

 

We didn't use the Unity built in terrain editor... We built everything using Blender.

 

Alright, thanks. I thought so too. You've given me good tips. Good luck on your project!

 

Here is a simple and clean overview of the game consisting largely of game play footage recorded from an iPhone 5. We're going to submit this as part of a package to try and secure corporate funding to create a next generation version of the game. I'm not holding my breath on getting that funding...

 

Movement speed is too fast for the animation.

All in all it looks good so far.

 

Thanks for pointing that out. The animation and movement speed is dynamically linked to a rage mechanic - I guess I haven't synced things properly yet. I'll add that to the list of things to do, fix, improve.

 

We made some tweaks and colour adjustments.

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I'm currently working on this area which is a city in the Dune. I like desert areas because they remind me of Morrowind which is one my favourites: your going to see dark elves in this area for old times sake. The buildings are all open and explorable although we haven't added roof tops, interiors, and doors quite yet. We got a new sky/lighting for this area and added some dirt maps as well. As I side note I finally started coding controls for desktop platforms mainly to simplify development but also to put a test build on a web player in the near future.

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I was tinkering with a dark elf character.. A city guard to be precise, he's not finished yet or anything. I'm not sure if the iPhone can handle both the specular on the armour and the character real time shadow quite yet. I think I'll be building a couple more races(beast like) this week for the city.. I'm trying to finish this area and all the city characters by halloween hopefully... With any luck I'll have the surrounding areas done as well.

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Yeah this guy is kinda elder scroll'esque.. I'll need to change that a bit.

 

Your game is looking really great!

 

Thanks SpaceMammoth!

 

My Nintendo developer registration was approved today and I've gained access to their suite of development tools and hardware which I can't wait to get my hands on.

It's nice to have access to a device that isn't a tablet or smartphone because there's really a lot more you can do with the game play mechanics. I suppose this means I'll have to sort out what's entailed in creating a custom version of the game for the WiiU.