STEAM LAUNCH!

Hi everyone!

Well today is the day, I just hit the launch button on Steam and DISORDER - Save Your Family is LIVE! I know it has been quite a while since I posted a dev log for DISORDER and so much has changed over the last few months! 

This Dev Blog will be a little long, but I want to give you an honest, and personal breakdown of some of the development and my experience as a solo dev. I have quite a bit to unravel here and get off my chest.

Here are the highlights if you’re in a hurry or not keen on reading a novel haha

• Camera System Overhaul
• The Evolution of the Ghoul
• The Chainsaw Timer
• Twitch Integration
• Multiple Endings
• Lessons Learned
• What's Next?

After a pretty awesome launch on Itch, and A LOT of bug fixing, I hit a bit of a cross road. Keep working on DISORDER?, or move onto the next game? Initially I wanted to release 3 short horror games this year, DISORDER being my first release, however I was not prepared for the awesome reception of the game and it forced me to re-evaluate my plans a bit…

My idea for the camera initially, was to have a similar system to Inscryption. I really love the camera system in that game, it has a very nostalgic feel to it and I thought it would be cool to experiment with a point & click style. I wanted to have these hidden click boxes that would only appear at certain times very briefly and if you were observant and quick enough, you could see some cool lil easter eggs.

As many of you would know, the initial camera system was quite buggy and janky, many times the camera just did not want to behave as intended and I found myself getting quite annoyed with it during development as well as seeing others getting frustrated online, so I decided to make a new camera system that felt smooth but still quite restricted.

The camera now follows the mouse cursor and the player can hold the zoom and look around freely while zoomed, which I feel is a nice change and I hope people like it.

Players can still use the mouse wheel to lean forward and look down at the table as well

The Ghoul has been a lot of fun, I went into detail on him a bit in a previous dev blog, he was not initially meant to be in the game, one day while working on the game, I felt the shotgun or hanging was not shocking enough, I remember thinking it would be really cool, if these big massive tattooed arms emerged from the darkness and snuffed out the family haha. So I began working in ZBrush, I used a template character and sculpted some more definition into the arms, exported the arms into Blender and then retopologized them. So for the most part, the ghoul was just two floating arms with no body ... until now!

I have given the Ghoul a body, more of a personality, and his own cutscenes.

As a kid, I watched so many horror movies and thrillers and I was really fascinated with crime movies. One movie in particular really stands out from my childhood. This movie is called “Strangeland” written by Dee Snider and released in 1998. It is a movie about a cyber stalker named Captain Howdy, who kidnaps people to put them through a pain ritual / rite of passage. Howdy is very sadistic and philosophical and some of the rants matched with his appearance is just really freaky and cool.

I couldn’t help but think of Captain Howdy and Strangeland while making this game so I decided to give the ghoul a similar personality and he even quotes some lines from the movie which I think is awesome!

This was an idea I had early on in development. I am a HUGE fan of the DOOM games and one of the most epic things to do in the most recent DOOM games… Sawing your enemies in half! There is just something so cool and badass about a chainsaw in video games and I really wanted to find a way to get the chainsaw into DISORDER. At first I wanted to just have the chainsaw as an execution, but then I thought it would be pretty cool if the chainsaw was a timer. The ghoul comes in with his chainsaw then walks around revving it for a set amount of time and if you cannot complete in time, someone is getting sawed in half. Just the idea of someone playing and catching them off guard was exciting enough for me haha.

So shortly after I decided to do this I ordered a small ZOOM field microphone and took a drive to my Dads farm to steal one of his chainsaws so I could record my own sound effects. My Dad has always been one of my biggest supporters, many times I have gone to him with an idea for some kind of dev equipment we could slap together on a low budget and he has always gone above and beyond to help me achieve it. Once we put together our own facial mocap rig by disassembling one of his very expensive welder masks, and plastic welding some pvc pipe to rig up a webcam in front of my face, and with that, we got facial mocap working. Good times.

My Dad has many different chainsaws but none of them really gave me the badass vibes like the DOOM chainsaw, so I gathered a ton of different reference images from all the DOOM games and I modelled my own chainsaw based off that ref sheet. I am quite stoked with how the chainsaw came out.

Next I began working on the animations, I built a simple custom skeleton rig for the ghoul and he also had his own accessory bones for various items. I quickly blocked together a couple of different animations, so I could get them into the engine and begin setting up the timer.

Once I had set up the timer and I was happy enough with the animations, there was one thing really bugging me about the chainsaw…I didn't have a nice big rotating chain with big gnarly teeth. I tried many different ways to get a cool rotating chain animation but in the end I just used a simple morph target that rotated the chain and I feel it has a pretty awesome look when in use

One of the things that caught me off guard with DISORDER, was how many streamers actually enjoyed the game. It’s funny too, as an ex streamer, I should have known people would stream the game but while I was building it, I didn't really think about the possibility of many streamers playing, or anyone at all really haha..

It was quite a surreal experience kicking back watching these people play live and also interacting with them in real time, and it made me think… wouldn't it be cool, if the chat could interact in the game, voting on who to save or who to kill, and I could visualize the words in chat appearing in game, in real time, floating in the background. What a cool way for streamers to interact with their chat and enjoy the game.

So I instantly got to work on the twitch integration, and boy was it a nightmare haha

I began researching every possible way to integrate the twitch api with UE4 and it was a rabbit hole I was not prepared for. I don’t really have any experience working with apis, I have always been quite adaptive and resilient with my work. I learn on the fly and dive into whatever hole I need to, to solve the problems in front of me, and that is the most fun for me with game development.

I had quite a bit of trouble getting started as I was not familiar at all working with docker containers and I found myself burning quite a bit of time so I looked into a plugin called TwiWorks which was a great foundation for me to get started. I quickly got to work on the in-game features and could quite easily test these features thanks to TwiWorks development backend. But then it came time to setup the login/authentication for twitch and man oh man, this nearly burnt me out.

I had 3 login methods to choose from… 1. Hosting the TwiWorks login backend on my own web server (most secure option) 2. Local Login (basically running a local server to run the authentication) 3. Hard-coded token (not very secure & quite risky for the user)

Option 1 was the clearest and safest option to me so I knew that this was what I needed to get working, however I have never setup my own web server before and had no idea on what I was getting myself into. I spent the next few weeks diving head first into the web server and authentication until finally…IT WORKED!

I could easily log into my own twitch account and all of the twitch features I had built were working quite well. When you log into DISORDER with your twitch account you get access to a few different options

• Profanity Filter
• Chat Voting
• Chat Hints
• Game Messages
• Subscribers Only

Chat voting allows the twitch chat to vote during key decisions, they can vote for who you save, or who dies. The votes tally up on the individual tv screens and the player then makes their choice with the votes front and center.

Chat hints are just chat messages being displayed in real time in the background and they slowly float out of sight, I visualized this early and I am pretty stoked with how it looks in game.

Game Messages are messages posted to the twitch chat, from the game itself. Eg. when it is time to vote, the game will post the voting options for the chat to see and will also post messages from the ghoul to the twitch chat. This also was pretty cool to see in action for the first time.

Subscribers only is pretty self explanatory, when enabled, the game will check each chatter to see if they are a subscriber and if so, their interaction passes in game.

Out of all of these features, the profanity filter was the worst… I had no idea there were so many different variations to just the N word, that I had to manually input, and I still don't think I got them all, let alone all of the other curse words around the world haha.

One of the biggest takeaways from the Itch version, people really wanted more endings. Many people assumed that there were multiple endings just because there was a score system and they were disappointed there were not more endings. Initially I thought it would be pretty cool to see the barrels and bodies swap out based on who you saved etc and it was a cool little experiment but it clearly was not enough. So what I have done now, I have put together 2 more endings for players to discover as well as an achievement for unlocking all of the endings.

I have been working in the Unreal Engine for many many years but I always found myself avoiding one of the biggest features, the Sequencer. I guess I have always felt a bit intimidated by it and I never really needed to use it extensively in my previous projects. With DISORDER I decided to finally dive right into the sequencer and learn as much as I can, and I am so glad I did! Nearly all of the executions as well as the endings are put together in the Sequencer and one of the things that surprised me the most was how quick I picked it up. All of the years animating in Maya and Blender as well as keyframing in after effects etc, it all translated over easily into the sequencer and I found the more animations I was putting together the better they were getting. I am not happy with many of the animations, especially the earlier ones, but I will be doing some more passes on those in the future.

One of the main reasons I have worked so long on DISORDER is because I am using this game as a reason to experiment with systems I have never used as well as sharpen my tools in other areas like widgets and sequencers etc. I also wanted to work on controller support, achievements, steam development and console development. DISORDER has been a great stepping stone to all of this and this experience will benefit my next projects.

The development for this game has been really fun and exciting, but also very tough, not only because I am a solo developer, but I am also a husband and a father of 4. My wife works full time, and I care for our infant daughter throughout the day in between work / school runs. It has been quite hard to balance it all and still find time to live a little and ensure I am present for my family. It has been rough to say the least haha

One of the hardest things in development so far, is the ability to see the good in a project after so long. I find myself doubting the game, often thinking “who's going to play a hangman game like this” and whether I'm burning too much time on a game that might not sell. It has been crucial to remind myself of the real goals, completing a game, releasing on steam and everything I have learned in between.

It's hard for me to know just how good the game is with limited testing, and especially when I know all of the answers and see all of the flaws. I managed to combat this by sharing the game with a few close friends who really tested the game and gave me very solid, unbiased advice. It’s really important as a solo dev to share the game with honest people who have your best interest at heart. People who will give you solid feedback, and not be afraid to tell you when something is not good. I am fortunate enough to have a couple of people like that on my side. It is a ton of fun watching others play your game for the first time, it reignites the fire, and pushes me to keep going.

Overall I am very happy with what I have achieved with the game, the experience has been incredibly valuable.

Now that the game is out, I am really looking forward to diving into my next game while also exploring console development. I do plan to continue QoL updates for DISORDER, I will be patching any major bugs that arise and if the game sells ok, I will look at adding even more game modes and more puzzles.

I want to say HUGE thank you to my family and friends, and everyone who has helped me along the way. I am very fortunate to work with some really amazing and talented people and having their input on the game has been really inspiring! Also thank YOU if you managed to read all of that, I have so much more I would love to talk about, maybe in the next dev blog haha 

 If you would like to know more about the development or my journey as a game dev, let me know in the comments!! I am also considering putting together a Dev Vlog, I have had a bunch of fun video editing over the years and it is something I think could be a lot of fun. 

Cheers!
Stonie.

CHECK OUT     DISORDER - SAVE YOUR FAMILY     ON STEAM