Kickstarter Playtest and Open Beta - Developer Update
over 3 years ago – Wed, Oct 26, 2022 at 12:07:54 PM

Greetings Travelers!

Welcome to this brand-new developer update for October 2022! Get ready for some exciting info as we share our upcoming plans and future endeavours,

Prepare yourselves: Playtesting Dungeon Full Dive!

As some of you might know, we are planning to playtest DFD with our community. That means that you can hands on Dungeon Full Dive experiences way before the official release:

While the game launch is still set for the far(ther) future (Q2 of 2023), we want to give our community the opportunity to provide us with feedback much sooner. Therefore, we are very happy to announce that we are launching the first playtest for Dungeon Full Dive in January 2023 for all our Kickstarter Backers!

We initially wanted to call the first playtest "Closed Beta" but we feel, that with such a big gap between release and the playtest in January, calling it "Closed Alpha" is more fitting. Nevertheless, we are very much looking forward to your feedback from the Closed Alpha. We want to thank all of you again, for supporting the development and being ready to help us with your feedback!

The closed alpha will be playable by all our Kickstarter backers as well as the late pledgers: You can provide us with your valuable thoughts regarding the mechanics of Dungeon Full Dive, as you will be able to test all the core features of the game early!

Additional details regarding the Closed Alpha and how to access it will be posted in the following community updates. So, make sure to sign up for our newsletter here to stay up to date in the coming months.

Who is interested in an Open Beta?

Additionally, we would like to provide more people with the opportunity to give feedback in the future: This means anyone that might have missed the backing window, or any of your friends who would like to join but haven’t been with the project since the Kickstarter days.

Therefore, we are currently reviewing possibilities for an Open Beta for next year. If you are interested, let us know and subscribe to our newsletter here. We would also very much appreciate it if you could SHARE THE PROJECT with people who might be interested in playtesting Dungeon Full Dive. Getting more input on how many people are interested in joining an Open Beta greatly helps us with planning ahead.

Stay tuned, as we will update you on the beta in the future. If you have any questions concerning this update, feel free to ask them in the new “update-faq” channel on our Discord Server.
Also, remember to Wishlist Dungeon Full Dive on Steam to support us <3

And as always:

We are truly looking forward to seeing you inside DFD!

– Your TxK Gaming Team

Our Character Editor! #2 - Developer Update
over 3 years ago – Fri, Sep 09, 2022 at 07:40:33 AM

Greetings Travelers!

Welcome back to our latest developer update and the second part of the character editor insight series, in which we are giving you a look behind the curtains of our character art pipeline as well as its main challenge: Creating a gorgeous-looking, visual art style for our characters, while at the same time meeting the strict performance goals that we set ourselves (to ensure good performance for all of our players).

While in the last part of the series (#1 The visual art challenge: Bringing your heroes to life), we investigated the visuals of our characters, in this part we will focus on the features of the character editor as well as the technical details that come along with it.

So, let’s dive right into it!

The Technical Setup

To build the fundamentals of our character editor, we first had to determine the parts of the character that we wanted to be able tomodify. So, we started by defining separate regions on the characters' face and their body, that should be swappable. These regions include body features like hair, eyes, and ears, as well as clothing such as chest pieces, gauntlets, or boots.

Another fundamental decision that we made for our character editor was that the clothing pieces should fit all classes:

If a wizard wants to wear heavy chainmail, why not let them?

Now, with our zones identified, we were able to swap out each of them individually. In theory, our characters can now mix and match their outfits with different hairstyles, chest pieces, boots, gauntlets, etc.

Character editor completed & adventure finished?  
Sadly, far from it! With this system in place there are two main issues that still exist and need solving:

1. Layered clothing
2. Performance

So, let’s take a deeper look into these two problems: Why do they exist and how did we solve them?

Layered clothing

When we compare our existing barbarian design with the design of this monk over here, we can already see one fundamental difference:

The zones we have defined for the barbarian are completely different in size compared to the monk. Not only are the monk’s sandals much shorter (barely going above the ankle), than the barbarian’s boots (almost reaching up to the knee), but the barbarian’s boots are also much thicker than the monk’s sandals! Now, what would happen if we simply swapped out the barbarian’s boots with the monk’s sandals?
By default, if we would swap out the boots with the sandals, there would be missing information for the shin region, leading to a rather disturbing result:

Of course, the easiest solution here would be to simply disallow shoes to come in different sizes!  That would mean creating a system where all clothing pieces are of the same size.

While a system like this would fix the problem and is also commonly used in other games, we wanted to push the amount of flexibility not only for our artists but also for the players, when designing their characters. So that we can allow a wider variety of character designs:

So, after investing some time into R&D we came up with a much more flexible solution:

Layered Clothing

By creating a layered clothing system, we allowed our clothing assets to be created independently of the region's sizes.

That means that our artists can create overlapping clothing pieces (e.g., very high boots, very long pants) and dynamically cut away the unwanted areas of each clothing piece depending on the other equipped clothes.

Normally overlapping clothes create frequent clipping (see image below), but by tagging each component with identifiers as well as a thickness level, we can compare these thickness levels and cut away the thinner component.

In the following example, the boots are thicker than the pants, so the pants should be tucked into the boots. Without a layered clothing system, the pants and boots would look like this:

In our case, the layered clothing system that we have created automatically hides the pants at the region, where they would intersect!

While this looks quite simple, the system actually needs to do quite A LOT of technical-art-magictm to handle all the edge cases that come along with the layered clothing (What happens if you have skin showing through a clothing piece? What happens to assets that vary in thickness within their own region: e.g., a knight’s gauntlet that has very thick hand elements but only thin cloth elements above the wrist?)

Nevertheless, our team was able to overcome all of those challenges and we are very happy with the current pipeline and its flexibility regarding layered clothing. Awesome job everyone!

However, with this issue solved, there was yet another main problem to be tackled:

Performance

“This all sounds very cool and customizable but will it run without burning through my graphics card?” you may ask.

It is very true that performance is critical, especially for VR games. Thus, a lot of thought went into the process of optimizing our characters and their clothing. Given that optimization is a completely different topic in itself, we want to focus on the main bottleneck with this system: Draw calls.

“What are draw calls?” I hear you asking.

A great indicator of the performance cost is how often the CPU (Processor) has to tell the GPU (Graphics Card) how and where to draw meshes on the screen, usually referred to as “draw calls”. Since those commands to the GPU are quite expensive, when it comes to performance, you try to reduce them as much as possible.

Now, that our characters are made up of almost dozens of individual meshes, stitched together, you can already see where the problem is: Our character who was just 1 draw call before now needsover 10 draw callsfor each of their regions! Additionally, each “material” (the textures that give colors and patterns to our character) requires 1 additional draw call, leading to a sum of around 20 draw calls!

This means with 10 characters on screen we would have almost 200 draw calls instead of 20 (including draw calls for the materials)!

While the example above is quite simplified the main issue is clear: we need to reduce the draw calls!

So, what did we do?

We were able to lower the number of draw calls to a minimum by combining the textures and meshes of our character. This means that instead of one or more draw calls for every region (which would be the case if every region had its very own texture or mesh), the CPU issues just two draw call for the whole character!

This combining does come at a cost though! While the runtime performance (when actively playing) is much better now, the actual combining and merging of the character are fairly resource intense, which means additional loading times. However, the process of combining meshes and textures happens within the CPU itself. We can actively optimize it and run those calculations in parallel for a significantly better performance!

The result is a much more efficient character editor that can craft performant characters with little to no loading times.

We could continue for hours about various technical details and optimizations that we deployed (like our solution for optimizing textures), however, given the length of this post already (comment “Rolling constitution saving throw!” if you are still reading!) we will end this community update on this note.

Nevertheless, we hope that this insight wasn’t too technical for you and that you enjoyed reading about our character editor! Of course, we will be active on Discord for feedback, questions, and just, in general, hanging out with you guys!

And if you haven't already: Don't forget to wishlist DfD on Steam to support the development team!  

Thank you very much for reading this community update, and as always:

We are truly looking forward to seeing you inside DFD!

- Your TxK Gaming Team

Our Character Editor! #1 - Developer Update
over 3 years ago – Mon, Aug 15, 2022 at 02:17:00 PM

Greetings Travelers!

Welcome back to our latest developer update, where we give you a peek behind the curtains of development! In the last months, we have been heavily focusing on the map builder as well as the character editor. Both of these topics are incredibly exciting for us to work on, and they both deserve a spot on their own in our developer updates.

For this update, however, we want to take a deeper look at our character editor. The reason for this is, that the work on the map builder has been strongly centered around optimization and improving our existing map asset pipeline: Technical essentials —that will enable us to make the most out of the players' hardware— which are, however, too technical for the moment (we will go into detail there, once the user-facing features are ready to be shown off as well!).

So, without further ado, thank you for your patience, and let's start with this developer update!

Whether it's crawling through a dungeon or dancing at the queen's ball...

...our adventurers want to be dressed for the occasion!

This was our highest priority when we set up our character art pipeline. We want to allow players to not only equip different prebuilt outfits but to actually mix and match different, individual clothing pieces!

Having this goal in mind we had to solve quite a lot of challenges. One of the biggest was defining a gorgeous-looking, visual artstyle for our characters, while at the same time meeting the strict performance goals that we have set up, to ensure a good performance for all our players.

So how did we do it? For the sake of readability, we broke down the results of our work into two main parts for you:

· #1 The visual art challenge: Bringing your heroes to life

And

· #2 The developer & technical art challenge: Our clothing system

#1 Bringing your heroes to life - An insight into the artstyle of our characters 

Initially, when we started on the concepts for our characters and their outfits, we spent a lot of time finding the right level of stylization and detail. We wanted our heroes to be the highlights of our fantasy worlds and yet perfectly fit into the style of the environments.

During the course of our conception phase, a wide variety of explorations and concept arts had to be created, in order to get many different variations for our internal testing. Through this testing, we succeeded in achieving a fantastic final art style that we are proud to show off to you.

So, let's accompany Dungeon Full Dive's barbarian outfit on its journey through our character pipeline from concept art to 3d!

2D - Exploration & Concept

The exploration phase is the first stage of conception, in which we wildly explore what is possible for the outfit. This is done before we actually decide on a certain design that we want to implement. The results here are far from the final detailed design, and more focused on the general elements that we want to have as well as the overall design. Things like the characters' silhouettes are also very important during this stage!

Exploration

Concept

After we decide on the final elements for the outfit, our concept artists proceed with creating a first rendered concept art:

The further we proceed with the pipeline and the more we transition from 2D concept art towards the 3D plane, the more we have to consider the details of the design. When making a 3D character something very crucial comes into play: technical limitations as well as the readability of the design.

That is why we must have an eye on things like the level of detail:

 3D - Sculpting, Modeling & Texturing

Sculpting

Next, based on the 2d concept, our 3D artists are able to sculpt a first model:

Texturing

With a 3d model in place, we are able to texture the character. That means giving him color and bringing the materials to life!

Of course, during all of these steps, we also go through a feedback & polishing loop. The feedback & polishing is crucial for our artists, to reach our targeted visual goals! This is one example of such a feedback loop for the barbarian outfit:

After we review and discuss the changes, we can work them in, and our barbarian looks like this:

Now we can finalize the textures ...and add the final details!

In summary, our outfits have to go through a lot of different stages before being ready for the game: from exploration to the concept, to sculpting, texturing, the feedback loop, and final polishing! 

I hope we were able to give you an insight and understanding into our work! Keeping the length of this post and your reading pleasure in mind, we will have to continue the second part of this post in a separate community update. But worry not! It's already prepared and will be posted next week ;)

So, stay tuned for part 2: "The developer & tech-art challenge: Our clothing system"

In the meantime, feel free to let us know in the comments: What do you think of the design? What is the next class that you want to see?

And as always: We are truly looking forward to seeing you inside DFD!

- Your TxK Gaming Team

Growing the Team for Dungeon Full Dive & DFD on Steam Wishlist!
almost 4 years ago – Mon, May 16, 2022 at 02:19:42 PM

Greetings Traveler,

Welcome back to our latest community update! One of the most exciting things that we have been working on in the last 2 months was growing the team around DFD. Therefore we would love to start this community update by proudly introducing you to the new faces of the team:

 Updates to the family 

New Party Members

Since our last update, the TxK family has grown quite a bit!

On the art side, we have Janina, Mathis and Till joining our party.

Janina will be responsible for creating beautiful animations for DFD.  At the same, she will also support all the other areas of the 3D-Asset pipeline such as modeling, texturing, and concepting.

Mathis has joined the art team as a character- and creature artist.  He will focus on creating brave heroes for us to fight alongside and dangerous enemies for us to vanquish. 

Till on the other hand will be working on creating stunning concept art to accelerate the work of the whole art team. 

Additionally, we also have V̶a̶x̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶V̶e̶x̶  Robert and Robert (yes two different Roberts) joining our Team.

Robert (also called "Bob") has joined the development team as a Senior Developer. With more than 15 years of experience, he will work on developing various features for DFD. 

Robert will also support the development team. But rather than developing, he will assist the developers with quality assurance by doing lots and lots of QA-Testing. 

If you are interested, you can also find more information about each of the new team members on our team page!

 Going forward with Community Updates 

Updated schedule

In our latest community Update, we happily announced the DFD Community Roadmap. As part of the community roadmap, we are planning to release some bigger development insights:

At the same time, we are currently deeply buried in working on big parts of the core of the game, which makes it hard for us to share meaningful progress as frequently as once a month. For the time being, announcements will take longer depending on the workload, but we aim to have an announcement out on roughly a bi-monthly basis. We know that reducing the number of announcements might keep you on your toes for more than you would like to, especially the eagerly excited ones of you. 

However, at the same time, it allows us to focus on the important work of developing the game. In the future, we aim to pass the communication to a dedicated community manager to make sure all of your wishes are heard (If you are interested in this position or know someone who could be, feel free to check out our career page!).

In addition, we are also investigating other ways to bring status information to all of you in a lighter format ―outside of the big announcements― via our different social media channels. So make sure to follow us there in case you would like to participate!

You can find our Discord over here, our Twitter over here, and our Reddit over here. 

 Dungeon Full Dive coming to Steam Wishlist 

Last but not least, we'd like to announce that Dungeon Full Dive is now officially available for Wishlisting on Steam! At the same time, the Late Pledge options on Backerkit for DFD will be disabled by the end of this month.  With the Late Pledge options being closed, we are able to slowly move forward to the finals release platforms: E.g. our steam page.  You can check it out over here. 

If you want to show us some support, please feel free to wishlist DFD on Steam! We'll also keep working on the steam page in the following months by updating it with new content. 

And with this final announcement, we'd like to wrap up this community update!

As always: We are truly looking forward to seeing you inside DFD!

- Your TxK Gaming Team

Releasing DFD Q2 2023 - Our Timeline and the road ahead
about 4 years ago – Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 05:19:19 PM

Greetings Traveller!

We have a lot to announce in this community update, so without further ado let's get straight into it!

The Release Date for DFD

At the end of last year, we made the difficult decision to delay the beta and the release of DFD by an undisclosed amount of time. Contrary to our expectations, you guys – the Community – accepted this generously and gave us even more motivation to continue. 

Since then we decided to wait with announcing a release date until we are certain that we can meet the new deadline.

That's why we are especially happy that in this Community Update, we are finally able to announce that DFD's release date has been set for Q2, 2023! At the same time, the beta for DFD is scheduled for the end of 2022. 

Taking your feedback from the community survey into account: We are planning to provide you with a feature- and content-rich game, which allows for a truly immersive tabletop experience rather than a simple tech demo that does not withstand any actual TTRPG campaigns. But how do we achieve this?

Dungeon Full Dive Levels Up

Next to the reveal of the release date of DFD, we have an equally exciting announcement to make.

We were able to secure over 600.000€ in funding to step up the development of Dungeon Full Dive! With that, we are almost tripling the resources behind DFD. What does this mean?

tl;dr: We can make DFD gooder.

Long version:

We have just received a special federal grant for video game developers ("Computerspielförderung") from the German government worth more than 250.000€. Along with that, we were also able to secure additional funds worth over 350.000€ coming from a variety of sources; including smaller government funds and investors. The official press releases are still in the works and you can expect more information about this topic in the upcoming weeks.

The funding enables us to welcome additional, talented industry veterans into the TxK Gaming family. We are very eager to let you meet them in the following Community Updates. So look forward to that! Adding their knowledge and expertise to our party, we plan to take Dungeon Full Dive to the next level!

Speaking of updates...

Our Community Roadmap 

Last but not least, we have also worked on the Dungeon Full Dive - Community Roadmap. With it, we want to provide you with a short overview of what you can keep an eye out for in these updates including – of course – our major milestones, community events, and various insights into the development:

We have a lot of exciting things planned for the future and hope that you enjoyed reading this community update. If you ever want to hang out with us and the community, feel free to join our Discord. We are just excited as you are for the release of Dungeon Full Dive.

And with that:

We are truly looking forward to seeing you inside DFD!

~Tom and Khang