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If there’s one genre that’s taken the world of indie games by storm in the last few years, it’s the rogue-lite. Or, perhaps, the roguelike-like? While the specifics of what to call these games is often argued, most of them are addictive, replayable, and challenging thanks to the magic of procedural generation.

Procedural generation is a technique that game developers employ to create content that generates its own unique challenges. This means it can reduce development times and costs, and thanks to its unpredictable nature, sometimes surprise both players and developers.

What Is Procedural Generation?

Simply put, data of any sort is procedurally generated when a mathematical algorithm is responsible for its creation. In the world of gaming, a wide assortment of things can be procedurally generated. For instance, a developer could create level assets like pits, enemies, obstacles, story elements, and power-ups and then, using procedural generation, set these things to appear at somewhat random locations throughout a level.

The advantage of using this method is that potentially thousands of unique levels could be created without human intervention. This drives endless replayability. A procedurally generated game could be enjoyed for ages longer than a game with traditionally generated levels thanks to players enjoying “new” levels years after the game’s development has ended.

Where Is Procedural Generation?

As mentioned earlier, the procedural generation has its place in a level generation. However, good procedural generation is more complex than our illustration may lead one to believe. When used to fill out a video game level with obstacles, for instance, parameters still need to be determined in advance to keep the game both fair and fun. What if a poorly coded procedural generation algorithm threw an abnormally large number of enemies at the player in the first level? It’d certainly make the game more challenging, but it’d also make the game less fun for new players. A game can’t enjoy longevity if it has no early life to speak of!

One deservedly well-loved rogue-lite that balances procedurally generated content with pre-determined elements is FTL: Faster Than Light in which players guide a ship through a galaxy full of hazards to deliver a message to the far side of the galaxy more or less in one piece - and then to defeat a massive, incredibly powerful enemy ship. While FTL can itself be beaten in a couple of hours (technically), the overwhelming majority of playthroughs end in death. Yet, players come back to the game over and over again, thanks to its use of procedural generation. There aren’t an amazing number of enemy types or items, the game’s story is neither lore dense nor dialogue-heavy, and yet it’s a game that keeps people hooked.

Every new run in FTL presents new possibilities. It’s a bit like gambling, really: you could be blown out of the sky in the first sector or, thanks to random chance and skill acquired through playing, you could make it all the way. The random elements in FTL keep it challenging and replayable. However, they’re not the only reason why the game works - it’s also well balanced, carefully crafted, and manages to be challenging in other dimensions without being unfair and frustrating.

Putting It to Work

For our own game, Bite the Bullet, we recognized the value of procedural generation and, early on in the development cycle, put it to work. Bite the Bullet is a run-and-gun platformer with RPG eating elements. Choose a class based on your diet (like the vegetarian Slaughter of the Soil or the carnivorous and blood-soaked Gorivore), eat your enemies to turn them into XP, and unlock powerful abilities (like Appetite for Destruction, which lets you eat incoming enemy projectiles). This set-up opened the door for some procedurally generated systems.

For example, there are plenty of side quests, bonus modes, and hidden areas in Bite the Bullet, but getting to them is a quest in itself. See, in BTB, side quest locations are randomized, so where you found that rideable hamster at a certain level isn’t where you’re going to find it the next time. Although the core of each level is designed by hand, this procedurally generated content keeps the gameplay fresh and engaging.

One of the most exciting possibilities that procedural generation offers is in terms of equipment that becomes available to the player. In FTL, you’ll occasionally receive weapons and ship upgrades, each with their own pros and cons - each new combination of items opens up fresh gameplay possibilities. In Bite the Bullet, we take things a step further: weapons can be combined with mods in order to change their effects. Love your missile launcher? Well, you can combine it with a mod that allows you to shoot multiple missiles simultaneously. Not enough for you? That’s alright, it wasn’t enough for us either - you can find an incendiary element that sets fire to your foes.

Worth It?

We knew that for Bite the Bullet, procedural generation offered a lot of advantages, but it also came with some risks. The technology is brilliant, but it does have its limits. For instance, procedural generation is not well suited to creating strong puzzles. That’s why Image & Form, after having used procedurally generated levels in Steamworld Dig ditched them in the sequel, in order to create puzzles that procedural generation wouldn’t.

Similarly, we were concerned about how procedural generation would impact the core mechanics of Bite the Bullet. We wanted levels that showcased all of the player’s abilities - jumping, dashing, and (of course) EATING. For example, the game’s calorie meter is drained for significant player actions, encouraging the player to keep gorging himself on his foes. If the procgen system didn’t sprinkle enough tasty enemy treats throughout, players would be a starving, weakened mess. This was another reason to design the levels by hand.

Game design is undoubtedly a tricky business. What on the surface looks like a small decision can, with poor management, turn into an imbalanced and precarious catastrophe. Creating video games is as much an art as it is a science. Procedurally generated elements, exciting as they are, do not come without the ever-present element of risk.

And yet, we are driven to include them. The magical spark of possibility that they open up to players is too powerful to ignore. At Mega Cat, we’re taking the risk, and we’re putting in the work on Bite the Bullet to create a game that you’ll love for a long time.

 

Ready to chow down? Wish list Bite the Bullet on Steam! You can also step into the kitchen and help test the game by joining our Discord!

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3
2. Overview of Chroma Integration in Coffee Crisis 4
3. Installing Razer Synapse for development 11
4. Installing UnityChroma(Native) SDKs 12
5. Creating animations 13
6. Testing on real/emulated hardware 18
7. Behind the scenes look 19

1. Introduction

We, Mega Cat Studios, have recently wrapped up development on Coffee Crisis, a multiplatform 2D Beat'em Up game for Sega Genesis, PC, and Xbox One! One of the features exclusive to the PC port that we implemented into Coffee Crisis was Chroma support. Chroma is a unique, proprietary, next-generation technology that Razer implements into its product line of high-end gaming equipment, which allows dynamic lighting on its equipment. Products created by Razer which implement their top-of-the-line Chroma technology include their keyboards, mice, mousepads, computer cases, and much more. Using the Chroma SDK, developers can integrate Chroma support into their games and applications, and configure the lighting on Razer's Chroma-enabled products. Such examples of Chroma integration include making the products light up as a VU meter in multimedia applications, encoding gameplay information on products, and even attempting to show images on the device by approximately color mapping colors in images to certain buttons/keys on the device.

Coffee Crisis is a neo-rogue brawler that puts you in the shoes of the only baristas on Earth with enough heavy metal in their veins to fend off an alien assault. Play solo or join up with a friend to fight across eight unique locations ranging from your Coffee House HQ to the far reaches of outer space. Go up against an army of wild alien enemies, and the humans they have brainwashed with a variety of weapons, special moves, suplexes, and coffee!

The Smurglian race has come to Earth and they're not leaving until they steal our three most prized commodities: heavy metal, free WiFi, and our coffee. Crunch through fistfuls of alien meat as you stop their invasion, and enjoy random modifiers to the enemies and action on each playthrough. It's a unique cup of beat 'em up action every time you play!

 

2. Overview of Chroma Integration in Coffee Crisis

As part of our feature set of Coffee Crisis, we implemented Chroma integration into our game. The game was created for PC/Xbox One using Unity3D, a closed-source but critically acclaimed video game engine created by Unity Technologies, applauded and used by Indie and professional game developers worldwide. To add Chroma integration into Coffee Crisis, we used the official Chroma and Chroma Native Unity3D SDKs. For our game, we utilized Chroma for showing colorific animations on the Blackwidow Chroma Keyboard in cutscenes and menus, and on encoding gameplay information. Specifically, we implemented the following:

• Menus
• Main Menu
• Animating keyboard to depict the background animation

• Credits
• Displaying a static color image of the final cutscene's background

• Cutscenes
• Story cutscenes
• Applying a 5-color, brown palette cycle of concentric squares on the keyboard

 

• Death metal/mod mode intro cutscene
• Displaying a static color image of cutscene's background

• Game
• Encoding various game information on the keyboard
• Encoding a health bar on the top row FN keys
• Keys
• Keys F1-F12
• Printscreen
• Scroll Lock
• Pause
• Bar increases/decreases as health changes
• Bar color tweens
• From green (max health)
• To red (low health)
• Encoding the hit combo counter on the row of numeric keys
• Number keys 0-9
• Bar increases as hit combo increases
• The bar becomes full and fully green after 20 hit combos
• Bar color tweens
• From red (low hit combo)
• To green (high hit combo)
• Encoding the hit combo cooldown timer on the first alphabetic row
• Keys QWERTYUIOP
• Bar decreases from full as cooldown timer decreases
• Bar color tweens
• From red (low amount of time left)
• To green (high amount of time left)
• Encoding the amount of time left on the invincibility and damage multiplier powerups
• Feature only viewable on full-sized keyboards, not half-sized (Blade keyboards on Razer laptops)
• The feature can be disabled by
• Selecting the keyboard type in the options menu
• Full-sized keyboards
• Blade keyboard
• This saves CPU cycles
• Keys 0-9 on Numpad
• Keys 1-9 color tween
• From green (high amount of time left)
• To red (low amount of time left)
• Key 0 stays a particular color based on powerup type
• Yellow for invincibility
• Red for a Damage multiplier

Hey friend, I'm dook, a programmer/designer working on Another Reigny Day, A VR castle defense game for the HTC Vive. Designing games for VR can be a daunting task since the medium is so new and always shifting. So we've compiled a small list of problems we've had, and solutions we've found to fix them. Quick disclaimer, I don't intend this article to be an authority on how to do things in VR, they're just things we've picked up along the way, and that have worked for us. VR design is such a volatile and subjective thing that everything in this post could be completely wrong or outdated with new hardware. Anyway, with that out of the way, here are some things we learned in no particular order.

For the love of God, don't make the player use the grip buttons too much

(on the vive wands anyway... most of the time...)

The grip buttons on the Vive have to be the worst part of the system. They're just downright awkward to press, or at least I think so anyway. Anecdotally, about every second VR user I've talked to didn't like using them, but some people don't seem to have an issue. Even if it only affects a small percent of players, you should always design VR with accessibility in mind.

But there are some use cases where the grip buttons are necessary. Objects that have to be used (i.e. guns) come to mind. You can't use the trigger for a grab action since there'd be no way to fire the gun. Using the grip buttons to toggle grabbing and trigger for using the item, is a pretty common solution. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find users that have a problem with that since the press is so in-frequent. But set it to toggle and not hold.

Locomotion options

Following the trend of accessibility, locomotion options are essential to make sure your players have a good experience depending on their tolerance to motion sickness. It might be a little extra work, but players appreciate this kind of stuff. Try to get all the standard ones in there if you can. So: teleport, trackpad, and arm swinger. Dash teleport is also a bit nicer than regular fade teleport since it provides great feedback to the player of where they're moving to without any sort of motion sickness. When play-testing Reigny, we often had players accidentally teleport downstairs and being confused about where they were since we only used fade teleport.

Don't cover the player's field of view entirely.

There's a flying monkey enemy that flings poop at the player's face and cover's the player's field of view with poo if it hits. This immediately brought a lot of players out of the experience and questioning what had just happened. This was kind of fixed with better sign-posting of what was happening: we slowed down the monkey, added a trail renderer to the projectile, and most importantly made the sides of the poop texture transparent so players could still see a glimpse of what was happening around them. Accounting also does this well in the courtroom scene that gestures you to reach onto your face by covering half of your view with black and putting a low pass filter on the audio.

Use tracked objects

Held objects that are 'tracked' feel way nicer than objects that are children of the controller. Tracked objects have the benefit of interacting properly with the environment (knocking over stuff) as well as moving when colliding with the environment (like a wall). It's a really simple thing that adds a lot to immersion.
Juice it!

Even though VR design is still pretty new and always changing, it's important to still adhere to some standard game design principles, especially making sure things are properly juiced. Sound + haptics are like half of what makes VR fun and are easy to neglect. Something that added a ridiculous amount of permanence was simply adding body parts and blood to the field on Another Reigny Day. The talk by Jan Willem Nijman (of Vlambeer fame) on juice is one of the best out there, and there are so many things that can be applied to VR (maybe not the screen shake parts though lol)

Accessibility

Thinking about accessibility is important for pretty much all games, and especially important in VR since you'll get a range of people playing your game. For example, how will kids and short people interact with things? A great way to test this is to try to play your game on your knees and see if everything can still be played ok. Some ways to deal with this could be to create tables with adjustable heights, or the option to scale your environment down to half scale.

Another important question to ask is if the player can play the game sitting down, or standing in place. Adding the ability to be able to turn on the spot is great for those with standing configs or people with only front-facing tracking.

Ergonomics is also worth keeping in mind when designing for VR. Experiences that have the player looking down or up for too long can cause neck strain. Having the player hold their arms out straight for too long can also be uncomfortable (ie using a bow and arrow for too long). Picking things up off the floor sucks just as much in VR as it does in real life, and should be avoided if possible. To fix some of these things in Reigny, we added the bow 'Recall' feature, which flings the bow from anywhere on the map to the player's hand, so they don't have to bend down. We also made using the bow for long periods optional, with an array of other options to help enemies part.

Use Audio to give cues about what's happening in the game world

Audio can be a great tool to alert players to what's happening around them without looking, which is especially enhanced by 3D audio in VR. With so much sensory input to the player, it can be really easy for the player to miss things happening around them. It's really important to create sound cues for things like enemies that might sneak up behind the player (footsteps work well with 3D Audio) or machines, that can sound off about if they're working properly or not. One of the issues we found when people played Another Reigny Day was that they were constantly surprised by enemies coming up behind them and attacking them, which happens when they break down the gate and storm the castle. The root cause of this was players not knowing if the gate had been broken. To help fix this we added a loud audio cue for when enemies are attacking the gate, as well as a loud crash for when it's been broken down.
That's it for now! If you'd like to read further into VR design I highly recommend searching through the Google I/O 2016 + 2017 talks on VR for things that sound interesting. GDC and VRDC also have some really good ones about things studios have learned developing for VR. I think it's also important to try out other people's games to build up a design vocabulary with others and get inspiration.

Finally, I'm including a short video demonstrating the most unique way to pause an HTC Vive Medieval Low Poly Action game in 2018:

Be the Fetus

Later skater

You can follow me on twitter @duckpizza for more VR shenanigans