designmatic Founder on Creating the Metroidvania Game Ayna: Shattered Truth

Introduction

I founded designmatic as a game studio in 2016 and set out to make premium games from that point onwards. The concept for Ayna: Shattered Truth is, in a nutshell, the retelling of a personal life's journey. It is based on my own life experience as a 1.5 generation immigrant moving from Kyrgyzstan to Germany as a kid and not feeling to belong anywhere in the world anymore.

Growing up, I could not speak German in the early days, and when I travelled back to Kyrgyzstan later, I also did not belong there, as I had picked up German as my mother tongue. This concept of not belonging is the main motif for the main character in the game called Sae. You start wondering why you look different than the other characters in the game and look for your place in that fantasy world.

We are currently just a team of four people, but had a larger team member size while exploring the art direction of the game. Right now, we are completely focused on the gameplay elements of the game to finalize them before committing to creating the final levels for the game. This is needed as we need to lock down the player abilities, as otherwise the level layout cannot be finalized and could even be broken by introducing new player abilities down the road that could allow players to skip sections of levels entirely.

Metroidvania games hold a special place in my heart, and when done right, are one of the most rewarding game genres. These games provide so much depth and cool gameplay mechanics that you completely immerse yourself in these game worlds. I want to re-create this feeling of jumping into a magical fantasy world and forgetting everything else in life while playing it.

Pipeline

We use Unity with the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) as our game engine, which has been heavily modified by us to meet our art direction with the stylized look. For audio, we use Wwise and Wwise Motion for controller haptics. Most of the concept art was created in Procreate. With respect to 3D assets, these have been created with either ZBrush, Blender, Maya, or a combination of them, with texturing done in Substance 3D Painter for the hand-painted look.

One of the biggest challenges compared to other Metroidvania games is that we need to create the game world in 3D, as we have shifting camera perspectives, and players will be able to explore levels in ways not seen so far in side-scroller Metroidvania games. Using 2D assets would break that illusion, and thus, the game is closer to a traditional 3D game regarding asset creation needs.

This small teaser shows the camera shift in a very subtle way, but there are more impactful paths planned that even allow players to walk around in half circles and thus see the level from the other side. For art, that means it needs to accommodate these gameplay aspects and provide visuals for all possible perspective scenarios.

Art Style

The art direction is deeply rooted in inspirations from Kyrgyzstan, but was extended to also feature elements from other Asian cultures to create a unique feeling for the world of Ayna: Shattered Truth. In the early stages of development, there was a lot of gathering of reference materials and creating concept art to create our own take on a Fairytale world.

It also took a lot of time to prototype the in-engine look and feel of assets and settle for a custom 3D rendering and lighting pipeline that allows 3D artists to achieve the desired painterly art style.

The video shows how layering several shader effects results in the final look of a character and outlines how important different effects are and how they can work in harmony to together to achieve the desired visual direction. We mainly use Ambient Occlusion (AO) and a rim light to provide details to the hand-painted character textures.

For the environment look we split it into three layers, namely foreground, middle ground, which is also the gameplay layer, and background. The foreground layer creates a composition that players naturally focus on the gameplay-relevant layer. While the background layer adds visual eye candy and makes the environment interesting for players to explore.

A depth of field (DoF) effect ensures that the backdrop does not overtake the visual importance of the gameplay-relevant layer. Volumetric fog creates a dream-like feeling that players feel as if they are in a Fairytale from the start. We also use screen-space ambient occlusion (AO) to add black inky patches into the environment to create this hand-painted feeling and to reduce visual noise.

Gameplay

The core gameplay loop for the game consists of combat, exploration, platforming, puzzles, and narrative. We want to ensure that every one of these components feels great and integrates naturally with the rest, without feeling loosely attached just for good measure. As a result, we focus on bringing to each one of them something new to the table.

Such as a wall run ability for making platforming feel fresh, which is currently an uncommon ability for side-scroller Metroidvania games. Another example is the player path and junctions for exploration that blend 2D and 3D exploration to bring these two concepts closer together. We call it 2.8D as it provides a more immersive sense of a game world while still staying true to the simple and tight controls used in 2D games.

The video shows the different emotions, like neutral, happy, or angry, of NPCs and the custom-created key-framed animations for each of these emotions. Every NPC in the game is getting these animations. For each dialog text snippet, the narrative designer can then decide with what emotion the dialog is performed by the NPC. Furthermore, for the quest system, we wanted to do a few things different to other games. We wanted to make them more immersive, and thus we created a system where NPCs track the player's position when they need help from the player.

Or, in other words, have quests available for the player. They try to grab the attention of the player to guide them towards the NPC. However, if the player decides to ignore them and runs past them, the NPC is reacting towards that player action, and that can be seen by the custom disbelief animation of the NPC. If the player does that a few times, and depending on the set patience character trait per NPC, that can result in the NPC getting upset. Here, the NPC is not talking to the player anymore but instead showing the player a cold shoulder until the NPC calms down again.

Conclusion

There are probably more things we have done wrong than right when we started this game studio and project. The best advice, which is repeated again and again for a good reason, is not to overscope your game when you start. That is easier said than done, especially if you have a passion for complex game systems and large game worlds.

Ayna: Shattered Truth is a good negative example for overscoping. We set out to build numerous more gameplay abilities and systems for each major area of the game, such as platforming, combat, or narrative. From the start, we aimed to get a publisher with external funding to be able to finish the project. However, with the funding situation in the last few years, this brought us into major trouble as we are dependent on external entities.

With a small project that executes well on a few game mechanics instead of numerous, it allows small teams to be in full control of finishing a game without external pressure from 3rd parties. Even basic mechanics like fluid and tight controls for jumping took us a long time to get right to be on par with other best-in-class games in the same genre.

Paired with a lot more abilities planned than other games, it results in a much longer development time than anticipated. By scoping correctly at the beginning of a project, a lot of these issues can be avoided, and there will be a lot of challenges to tackle in any game development journey.

People can wishlist the game and try our demo on Steam right now. We also share and discuss development updates with our community on our Discord server. In addition, we share our favorite meals that help us develop the game.

Valentin Erlenbusch, Founder of designmatic

Interview conducted by Emma Collins