Ratopia DevDiary #2 – Graphic concepts and technological examination

Hello everyone! 

It’s Cassel, developer of <Ratropolis>, and who is developing <Ratopia>

This time on DevDiary, I’d like to talk about how we have come to this style of graphic style on the game.

Setting Graphic Concenpts

The graphic concept of the game was already planned broadly from the beginning.

The vivid image of Ratizens from <Ratropolis> in the world of <Oxygen not included> was carved in my head.

There was opinions that we should put some WIFU characters in the game this time, so that the game could attract more people, 

but I wanted our game to be remembered whenever the players see anything like mice.

So we decided to put cute lady rat in the game.

Since the broad concept was already set, we could make a draft image of the characters right away.

But this time, we’ve drew much bigger and more detailed images of characters, 

since we knew that we will be with this rats for long time.

Many Candidates of Mister Ratopia!

We’ve choose it to top 3 of those, and colored them.

With thorough thinking and discussions, we’ve decided to choose the one with the arrow on the image above, 

and after that, we’ve checked it with many facial expressions and gestures.

Fine rat lady and characters from <Ratropolis>. Aren't they adorable?

After making clear of the direction of the design, 

we had to think about tile images where they will be living on.

For me, the smooth covering between different tiles and lighting of metallic surfaces in <Oxygen not included> felt so natural.

So I thought that might be the most developed style of tile-map system, 

and wanted we could have similar design on our game too.

 

<Oxygen not included> - So distinct among many other tile-map games!

In many games, they put additional image on each side of square-shaped tiles,

making smooth connection on the boundaries of each tiles.

But <Oxygen not included> seemingly has different style;  putting a larger tile first and cutting the parts crossing the boundaries.

‘This might be better for optimization’ I thought, and in addition to that, this seems like much natural.

So we have checked how it would look like if we put that style on our game.

<Oxygen not included> styled tile map concept 

The concept design was good enough, even beyond my expectation.

However, applying it for the game was totally different task from what I have thought.

We could not find references to apply those technically, so had to hard-code to make as similar as possible, 

resulted more than 30 seconds of loading time and system errors as after effect.

Optimization Concern

After the incident with tile system, I’ve been concerned whether the game could be created and work fine as designed.

The main goal was to put huge amount of rats on a large map, 

so optimization issue had to be cleared even from the very beginning of development.

In order to do so, the overloading problem of tile system had to be solved.

The plan was to put 250,000 tiles in a single map, 

but loading 2,500 was already causing problem on the system

We could not use that system since many more aspects with more calculations will be added to the game.

We’ve put many optimization methods to lessen the problems but the effects were negligible.

Eventually, we had to give up that system, and changed the map system to adding images on each sides of tiles as the other games did.

An example of adding-images-on-sides method

Adding image method had uncomfortable aspects such as needs of new images for boundaries of every tiles, 

and limitations of tile design since they all had to be designed within a single-tile sized,

but this could load around 10,000 tiles within 3 seconds, much fast and stable than previous one.

 <Oxygen not included> sure would have much better system I believe, 

so I was quite disappointed since we could not use the one like it because of the technological issues.

While considering new method on tiles, 

we also thought about optimization of the rat characters.

When developing <Ratropolis>, we’ve used software called <Spine>.

And we have experienced that the number of ‘bones’ on character could give massive overload on the system.

Tail removal of rats for better optimization :(

So This time we have made rules so that the animations would only take the minimum usage.

All the characters are designed to have the minimum number of bones, same animations, 

and to change their appearance by changing their skins.

This was the best way to optimize the game, 

but had limit on expressing what we wanted to show.

Silhouettes of characters were hard to be identified, 

and adding new skins always had to consider what have been already designed.

Trial and errors for making spine rules for optimizing

It was a bit disappointing that the graphic got downgraded for optimization,

Buy I put more value on smooth running of the game.

Since, especially, the genre of the game this time is ‘City-Building Simulation’.

Still, the discontenting parts of the game graphics will definitely be replaced.

Self-development Time

Due to the rescheduling issue caused by optimization re-building,

we had to adjust working tempo of our art team,

because we were gaining more chance that we might not be able to use the resources that had been already created.

So until the full-structurization of the system,

Every 2 hours of working time on a day were given for self-development.

Since we all knew that the higher skill of teammates will affect greatly for the better game,

We ordered many books and resources to develop our expertise.

And every Friday, we took time to present what we have learnt for that week,

so that we could discuss how we are going to use that skills developed.

Shared scene about designing new characters based on their characteristics

Time given to all for skill development was truly meaningful.

We could gain more confidence on each other by watching ourselves gaining more expertise.

And my belief of us being able to go through any kind of obstacles together got stronger.

This period of time continued about a month.

After technological diagnose of the system optimization got ended, we began to focus on developing the game.

So the story continues to the building AI for the Ratizens of the game,

and creating structures they are using,

for the next time.

Thank you for reading this long texts.

Hope you have an amazing day.