Who We Are

We're Omni Systems, the co-creators of Eufloria, Bioframe Outpost, and more. We offer game design features, dev stories, design innovations & lots of other useful things for up and coming game developers. We also frequently give away rare assets, concept art, and even entire games. We only share content that we value ourselves, rather than following trends.

In This Edition:

• ICYMI: Eufloria 2 Announcement
• Hard earned game dev tricks to save time + money.
• How to draw aesthetic inspiration from… butterflies?
• Using quake map editors with Godot
• Introducing our own Godot-build Eufloria level editor
• And also: more great interview content, indie game recs, and plenty more.

Have at it!

Eufloria 2 Announcement

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ICYMI: Eufloria 2 is now in development for PC and Steam Deck. We got into far more detail in the previous newsletter, but the tl;dr is:

• The first direct sequel to Eufloria is in development
• The Steam page is up right now (And we'd really appreciate a wishlist)
• Milieu is providing a brand new original soundtrack
• We are taking a very open approach to development, and will be including our community as early as possible
• There's also a Godot-based level editor, that will be publicly available later in development

Dev Corner - How We Make Games

Gamedev Series: Stupid little Dev Tricks That Work

There are many very in-depth and detailed gamedev articles and videos out there, which is great, but sometimes as an indie dev with little money or resources you just need an fast-but-good solution.

The Plantpot Method - Steep Slopes Edition​
Rudolf picked this up about 25 years ago when he was a level designer at Douglas Adams’ company TDV, working on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game. When he was trying to figure out how to perfectly align and texture a tricky corridor connection, the level editor programmer suggested simply hiding the ugly spot by “putting a plant pot in front of it”. This sounds stupidly simple, and to some agree it is in practice, but it’s also fundamentally insightful, even profound. Especially for time and budget-challenged indie devs.

It poses the question: Is it really necessary to spend valuable dev resources on your problem? Well, often the answer is, “no” or, “not now”, and instead make it go away with a simple trick or solution.

​Here is an example where the plant pot method is applied with great effect in Bioframe Outpost. Let us know what you think?

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Simplicity is often hard because it requires the skill to reduce a huge number of considerations into a small set of actions. This is why the Plant Pot Method can be so powerful, and we will return to it in future videos.

Feature Game Dev Article - Butterfly Inspiration

People often ask about where game devs get inspiration for their work, so I thought it could be fun to share one of ours for Eufloria. This one may surprise you a bit.

Aesthetic​
Eufloria games have a very gentle, organic aesthetic that comes from procedural generation of floral elements. Game creatures and entities are all part of an eco system. You literally grow your units as seedlings or flowers on trees, and their look is affected by the unique soil composition of their particular location. This is reflected in unit stats and shapes, as well as in the look of the trees and their leaves and fruit and seeds and so on.

Palette​
As Eufloria is an RTS, we needed to keep the colour palette readable in gameplay terms, so players could identify which teams the units belong to with just a glance. And that was actually quite hard to pull off, partly because the procedural creatures only have a few visually distinct elements.

Seedlings for example just have a simple body, wings, and a proboscus, with limited ways to create colour gradation. Additionally we were limited to a 5 colour palette, which is not much!

We really struggled with this, and ended up with samey or ugly colour combinations, or creatures that just didn’t stand out against the game background. (A bit of a problem in an RTS where you quickly need to see what unit belongs to what team.)

So we went looking for inspiration and eventually Alex and I found it in a lovely place. (May have just been Alex, I honestly don’t remember)

Insectoid Inspiration​
Turns out, nature knows best, and a perfect answer to our problem was to be found in butterflies! Pretty much all butterflies are beautiful, and elegant in their aesthetic, yet only use a few colours to achieve their beauty. (See where this is going?)

So, we extracted the colour palettes of a bunch of butterflies, did some experiments, and ended up basing Eufloria empire colours largely on this concept. Here are some examples of different palettes we found:

And translated to game entities and their empire colours they looked like this:

Finally, here is how that looks ingame:

Works quite well, right?

Conclusion​
Ever since we did this I have made it part of my visual design process to look to mother nature for inspiration or aesthetic guidance. Sometimes the answers are right in front of you if you look away from your screen.

I am sure other devs/artists do the same, and I would love to see examples of similar sources of inspiration by other people out there. If you have any, please share!

Gamedev Resources Roundup

Godot Level Design + Quake = What now?​
Did you know that Godot can read Quake style .map files? It can, with a plugin, which opens up the ability to use Quake level editors like Trenchbroom for Godot game development.

Which is rather awesome* and also very useful.

Some useful links: The func-godot plugin github page can be found here.

A recent discussion on the r/Godot subreddit has some very interesting comments.

*(Editor note: Rudolf has a background in the Quake mapping scene)

Review Guesser​
This might seem a bit odd, but hear me out. Review guesser shows you a Steam game page (random or within a genre, based on your play mode) , but with the review stats removed. It asks you to guess the correct number of reviews the game has garnered from a range of multiple choice options.

This is quite fun in its own right, but after playing it for a while it soon becomes clear that it is an actually useful resource, as it does the following:

• Tests your understanding of genre popularity - (It’s a great way to see what is popular or successful within genres and subgenres. Extremely useful knowledge for marketing)
• Works great as a game discovery tool - (Found many hidden gems this way, some hits, some underplayed)
• Teaches you to be less dismissive of game ideas - (some real unexpected hit games out there)
• Excellent game idea generator - (It’s almost impossible not be inspired with a whole range of new ideas for games or gamedev after a session)

Try it for yourself. It’s on Itch and it’s free.

From the Omni Systems Lab

Eufloria Enemy Mine Level Design Log​
We are using Godot to develop a new level editor for Eufloria 2, and with a level editor comes the desire to make new levels, which is fun to share with people.

In this case, we’d like to share progress on a level that takes an existing game unit (the humble laser mine) and creates a game environment that favours its use by making the mine extremely powerful and effective, while the traditional seedling units are weakened. Creating this giga-chad of a lasermine completely changes the gameplay by making traditional tactics non-viable, forcing the player to figure out how to get the most out of these new laser mines. It is also another example of the “push your stats” design philosophy we discussed previously.

Here is the first video about it; have a look.

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Btw, we have yet to name the editor. Some of the suggested names are too stupid to believe. “Fasteroids”? Really?

Eufloria Classic Patch and New Content​
We released our first major patch for our space flower RTS Euforia Classic!

It features some really nice new content, including new types of levels and features that are pretty different from what you normally get.

That includes an entire ambient experience mode/visualiser, which can run endlessly and looks like this:

Super zen ONE HOUR LONG ambient asmr video.

For the full patch notes go have a look at our Steam page here.

Alan Dean Foster Interview Part 3​
Our conversation with the legendary author continues. In this section we learn that Alan has done seminal work for games as well, with some really fascinating stories about game novelisations, Lucas Arts, and more. There is such a wealth of knowledge and experience in Alan’s stories, much of it will be of interest to people interested in video games.

Watch Part 3 here.​

The Grab Bag - Stuff that is cool but doesn’t fit elsewhere

What we’ve been watching/playing
​The Eternal Castle is a fascinating indie game that purports to be this:

It certainly looks and plays the part, with a superb evocation of early classics like Another World or Prince of Persia. The thing is; there never was an original Eternal Castle from 1987, and when you start playing the game it soon becomes clear that there is a lot hiding under the surface, both in terms of lore, design, and artistic intent, pushing the game far far beyond a retro-nostalgia effort. This rabbit hole goes mighty deep. Bare Metal Bryan’s incredible deep dive is a great way to see that. Have a look.

The game is hard, but beautiful, frustrating but artful, and frequently rewarding in that old fashioned way where you get a real sense of euphoria when you have been stuck on an area for quite some time and suddenly figure out what to do to progress. If that sounds intriguing at all go visit the Steam Page to see for yourself.

Goodies Page

As always, go visit our goodie page for a plethora of free content, games, art, you name it. And that’s real free. Not bait and switch “free”. Check it out here with the password LOVEGAMES

Sign Off

“ That’s it for this edition. Kudos for sticking with it till the end. We tried to keep things a bit more focused and practical, without losing the handmade quality of the newsletter. Let us know what you think? — Rudolf Kremers