Scarf: Walking with Souls

Community Showcase Game Development
1

Hi!!
We are Uprising Studios, a small studio from Spain.
We are working on a game named Scarf: Walking with Souls and we thought of writing a devlog!
We are currently making one at tigsource, but we thought of publishing here too in order to get feedback from the community.

DESCRIPTION

Scarf: Walking with Souls is a 3d adventure game with touchs of H&S.
Hyke is the main character of Scarf. He’s a weak creature but he’ll have the help of his polymorphic scarf.

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The are different worlds in the game. Hyke must explore them in order to remember his past and understand his journey’s origin.

The worlds of Scarf are populated by various creatures, some of them aggresive with the main character. Hyke must face enemies on his way, and they will try to stop his adventure.

SCARF

One of the pillars of the game will be the scarf. Without it, Hyke would be defenless. It is through the scarf that Hyke can manage to interact with his sorroundings and possible enemies.

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The scarf will change its form to create different objects that will help Hyke to continue his way.
This would be, though, habilities that Hyke will not possess since the beggining.

COMBAT

The combat will have influences from the hack and slash kind of combat and the action rpgs.
We want the combat to be quick and easy, with a fast system of swiching weapons (forms of the scarf).

This are some enemies of the game.

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WORLDS

The world of Scarf will be divided in different worlds.
Right now we call them:

Forest

Desert

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The mountains

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**Grassland
**

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CURRENT WORK

We are currently working on a technical demo of the game.
For this demo we have decided to pull out the combat (it has been in production for some time but we have decided to focus on some other aspects of the game right now). We are focusing on the looks and a little bit of story/exploration part at this moment.

The demo is set in Grassland.
Hyke will have to discover how to get to the Temple in order to finish the level.
We are just now working on the gameplay.

This are some concept art of the Grassland level.

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This are screenshots of the game.

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(This is a few months ago’s screenshot. We improved the environment since.)

This is more recent:

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The demo in which we are working will be finished on February (probably), when we’ll stop the production to find financing to keep us working properly.

TEAM

We are currently a team formed by:

Programmer / Game designer
Concept Artist / Game designer
3d Artist
3d Animator
Composer / sound designer

We are going to keep posting. The different persons of the team will post some of their work and more specific things about the game.

SOCIAL

Twitter: https://twitter.com/UprisingWorks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Uprising-Studios-343545745806180/
Website: http://uprising-studios.com/

We hope you like our work!

1 Like
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been watching you guys on indieDB and gotta say i love the concept for this as well as the style!

3

This concept and art direction look absolutely fantastic! Cant wait to see where you guys take this in the future.

Good luck!

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Thank you! We’re really glad you like it!

Thank you!
We will be posting more!

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When do you think you will be posting some gameplay? I am really interested in seeing the game in motion!

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Amazing art style! Waiting for video

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The World’s design

We hope we can show some gameplay at the end of month (first of february if don’t)!

In the meantime we want to share some of the process of the World’s design.
The demo is set in Grassland, in what we call The Meadow.

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The meadow’s scene design has been gradually changed and improved. We are talking about an extensive area with big plains and a wide variety of lush, an area were an ancient civilization was settled and from which only some old ruins remain in this world. The biggest challenge we had to face was to embody the pictorial artistic style of the original concept art to the 3D, keeping the expressiveness and colouring that the drawings have.

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Starting from the original concept art, we worked on the form of terrain, testing with different compositions with BSP in UE4, always trying to remain true to the map design we worked on previously.

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Once we had our skeleton done, we kept working improving this.
The next step was to build the island and define its final design, for which we worked with the 3D artists, testing different level constructions.

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At this point, and with the terrain design completely stablished, blocking got started by placing each element from the modeling. As we were not only looking for an eye-catching design, but also to ease some aspects of the gameplay programming, many tests and level variations were done, changing some areas and substituting some elements.

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The placed items were not definitive but were very helpful for us to have a rough idea of how the meadow should look and how to obtain that feeling of overwhelming fantastical nature.
The 3D team started working on the details of the scene.
(We’ll talk about the 3D modelling with more details about the creation of the walls, architecture, rocks and vegetation in other post!)

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Finally, we could end up with an enhanced version of our assets (more define textures, more materials, a more polished nature) and with its execution we have moved very much closer to the final result we are seeking.

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We have included many new elements, from new lush green vegetation and architectonical elements, to new floating island or giant roots, trying always to improve the looks.

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We are working extremely hard for the artistic performance part to be something gorgeous and unique. We still need to add some things to assure that the trip through the meadow is going to be enjoyable, but also impressive, and breathtaking due to its dimensions and details.

Hope you like it!

8

Looks beautiful and interesting :slight_smile:

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Great concept and beautiful landscapes! Good work there :slight_smile: I hope you get the financing you need to complete the game!

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@cgd
The concepts and game are amazing and very unique.

11

Thank you for the kind words!

Thank you very much ! :slight_smile:

12

work guys keep it up :D!!! super nice concept

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What an , unique & innovative idea! I’ll be keeping an eye on this for sure!

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Your trees are very interesting, is that just meticulous UVing for the paintstrokes texture or are you lerping it into the colors with a worldspace-mapped texture?

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I am pretty much in love with this project. Left a like on your Studio Page on Facebook, hope to see more updates soon!

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3D Art

Thank you for your kind words.
People liking it, it’s a huge motivator.

It’s something in between, the texture is painted like the concept art for example.
Though right now we’re having some problems precisely with the trees. xD
I am going to ask for a better response and I will answer properly :slight_smile:

In the meantime we would like to talk about the 3D art.

In Scarf we are giving lot of importance to the looks, and we are trying to develop the game with a true artistic visuals.
Since it’s not a realistic kind of game we try to approximate the most to the concept art designs.

A big part of this is the vegetation and the landscape.
Knowing that we were working on a meadow, our concept artist worked in lots of drawings that could be a good representation of the looks.

For the landscape, the 3D modellers made a huge number of rocks.
When the design of the map was done, all the rocks were used for making little islands and walls…
Here’s one!

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Concerning the vegetation: We try different styles, (different textures composition, leaves quantity, tops).
As you can see we make an effort maintaining the form of the concepts into the 3D, since Scarf is a game with a great importance in the looks we wanted to keep faithful to the drawings.

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For a more detailed map, we include different assets on the map.
One of the most important were the roots.
Over time, this roots have increased their importance in the game. We’ll show something about gameplay soon hopefully.

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As we mention in another post, in Grassland there was a previous civilization, and only ruins remain.
The architecture of Scarf is composed of only a few assets, but these can be combined to make different kind of buildings.

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We are working to add some more detail on the scenario, for example WIP waterfalls.


(gif of the wip waterfalls outside the demo)

Right now we are really happy with the atmopshere and colorful ambient, but we are still in process and we have to optimize and polish the results yet.
Hope you enjoy this entry! :slight_smile:

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17

Hello Guys,

just a word to say I love your main idea, the scarf changing form to get new gameplay elements looks .
The game looks nice really :-).

If you ever need some help about Level Design just contact me. I am working a lot with UE4. I was the level designer on the game Q.U.B.E and I’m now working on AAA, but this is exactly the kind of game I’d like to do. Adventure/Platform/Puzzle (kind of Ori and the blind forest or Darksiders 2 or even Zelda).

Hope you’ll go further with that. Can’t wait to see more of it.

18

This looks really interesting!

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Thank you! Glad you like it!

Thank you misterdante.
Right now we’re not in that phase (finishing the demo), but we’ll think about it when it comes :wink:

Well guys, we haven’t been able to update the devlog since february, sorry for that.
We’re working really hard in finish our demo. We’ll come back to the updates, promise.
In the meantime We want to share with you this ingame footage. It’s not gameplay though. It is our pause screen.
Hope you like it!

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I love the artwork, the actual implementation in 3d doesn’t match the artwork though.