Age of Rust Dev Update #14
Over the past few months, there’s been a significant effort to drastically improve the quality of the game, to improve the playability, graphics, performance, and core game mechanics. A lot of these improvements were driven by the great feedback of the early beta players last year. For this dev update, thanks to some of the new tech and improvements, I wanted to cover a couple of the characters that are now able to be a part of Age of Rust again.
Bringing characters to life in Age of Rust
One of the more difficult things in game development is a character workflow pipeline, this is essentially how characters make their way from design to making it into the game. Without going into a discussion about the “uncanny valley” in computer animation, there’s also a range of character quality levels that exist for game characters. No doubt you’ve seen some high quality NPCs show up in games over the years, but indie game developers have always struggled with being able to put decent looking NPCs into games. This is mainly due to the complexity and technical problems with the pipeline workflow. With players in the role of the protagonist, Quinn, getting the storyline from the games characters is an import piece of the worldbuilding and puzzle solving.
Jakka — Players in the beta will remember waking up in the temple vault in a cryolab in the intro. However, the initial plan was to have players guided through a war zone on Taphao by Jakka, a special operations solider which Quinn has had a long history with. With Jakka being added to the game again, it restores a critical aspect of the story for Quinn and the player tutorial. In the next release, players will start off with Quinn and Jakka going through the tutorial mission together as originally planned.
Even AAA studios struggle with bringing characters into games, if you saw the Starfield demo from Bethesda, you’ll notice some NPCs that don’t reflect the other amazing graphics in the game. There’s such an insane complex series of putting a character into a game, it’s almost just as much work as building an entire game itself. While game engines are trying to make it easier from a design and quality perspective (Ziva for Unity, Metahumans for Unreal), it’s still a difficult process to do.
Alex — As a member of a group called The Syndicate, she is part of a key backstory to the game. Her role was pretty important and shapes how Quinn, the main player, has to deal with certain situations that happen in the game. Bringing Alex back into the game was something important for both the story and the gameplay.
When Age of Rust started development, one of the hurdles was characters. At the time, the design workflow required about 5–10 people with different skills sets to do design (mesh, bones, hair, makeup, skin color, texture, hair, clothes, etc) then additional workflow (motion capture, blendshapes for emotion/speech) and then more workflow to bring them into a game (shaders, rigging, inverse kinematics) to doing something inside a game. For indie devs, this process is a nightmare, because you often to go back and forth dozens of times before you get the result you’re looking for or at least close to it. For example, the tattoos and makeup for Alex was a huge technical challenge.
Markus — As an imprisoned general in NX City, he has ties to both Arjen and the Syndicate. Quinn’s story continues in trying to figure out the mysteries between Markus, Alex, and Arjen. While Markus remains a somewhat shadowy figure in the underworking of a few backstories of other characters, his role in propelling the gameplay forward was really important.
While Age of Rust is about A.I. taking over the galaxy, there was still the need to have all these different characters in the game, which was a problem because in some of the early workflow for characters, things didn’t look right. In this example test below, the original workflow for character imports resulted in low quality imports. Ideally, the “soft target” for character quality was something in the ballpark of what a AAA developer might have created in the last few years. From a development standpoint, Age of Rust reached that turning point this year, which allowed us to bring back these characters that were originally cut from the game.
Along with these improvements, the characters also have a lot of functionality that NPCs typically have, including combat, if the story calls for it. We can now tell the story and character narratives in the game as originally planned. Bringing characters like Jakka and Alex to life has been an important goal to round out some of the storyline and gameplay. The early alpha had no characters in it at all, so it felt like more of a challenge to relay aspects of the storyline for players.
Estelle — A character that was first introduced in the 2D text adventure, is now part of the game. There’s been a few designs for Estelle, but she’s always been a no-nonsense bounty hunter with Arjen as a partner. Estelle has always been an important character to Age of Rust and bringing her to life off the page is something that I’ve been looking forward to. Keen-eyed players may have spotted her cryopod in the Temple Vault area in the early beta.
Ultimately, driving the narrative and worldbuilding for Age of Rust is an important key aspect of building out the game for players to explore. Plus, with the improvements in Unity and character design, all these characters, and more, will be in the next release of Age of Rust coming to the PC platform later this year.
Our next update will be about the improvements in the gunplay and enemy combat!
