H-Group 

Viktor Haimi – Programmer
Toni Heinonen – Programmer
Vesa Hovinen – Programmer / Level Designer
Olli Heikkinen – Artist
Fansu Janneh – Music

 

Valley of Brass

Idea

We decided to make an RPG game with grid-based combat system. The combat system was inspired by South Park: Fractured But Whole’s combat system, UI by Final Fantasy VII and overworld by Grandia. In this game you control a Harvester automaton called Jules in a steampunk world. In this world there are no living things anymore (but they are coming back).

At first the setting was steampunk with fantasy elements. But in the end, we did not include any fantasy elements in this game.

 

Development

We had 5 weeks to make this game done, and we managed to get finished product done, although we had to hurry a lot during last two weeks. We had good work flow and structure in development, constantly keeping track of our progress, but we still had few hiccups along the way, for example we had to redo our camera control at the last week and few unpredictable absences during the last two weeks.

Art

Valley of Brass was designed to be a fully 3d experience from the ground up. This was somewhat challenging seeing that what we had learned about 3d modelling and animation was during this course and we didn’t want to use premade assets, but there’s nothing that shear will and couple of handy Youtube videos can’t manage. Seeing that with the past few projects I had learned a little about 3d animation and had done some low-poly models I wanted to up the ante a little. That’s why the models in Valley of Brass are smoother, and the textures aren’t as blocky as they were in our previous projects. The world of Valley of Brass is bleak and rusty, fitting well in to the archetype steampunk atmosphere we were aiming for. This game also features rigged models, which means that each animated model has a skeleton of sorts, that can be easily manipulated to create simple animation. Overall, I was happy with our original designs and how they fit the world.

 

Story

The story of Valley of Brass takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which machines have taken over and live ordinary lives in a mostly non-organic world. The player takes the part of a one harvester droid whose mission is to save all machine-kind.
The trick in writing the story was to have an epic narrative that would also naturally flow with the gameplay. That’s why the game tells the story via traditional dialogue windows a la old RPG games such as in Final Fantasy adventures. The story took approx. one week to write and polish to its current state. A few moments from the story had to be cut due to some constrains with the gameplay.