Gravy Engine

Howdy everyone!

I forget to post updates to this platform sometimes, I've been mostly focused on LinkedIn.  Mostly because LinkedIn allows me to find other incredible and talented people within or around my domain. Most of the team for the game remake was found through there. A handful now though have been through the incredible people at LatAm Talent, who are world class at finding the right person for the job. My first role I tasked them with was so incredibly niche in terms of skillsets I was actually dumbfounded when they not only found someone quickly, but someone who was born for the role. This isn't a plug, sponsor, ad, or anything like that, I'm just genuinely impressed.

So that being said the team now is over a dozen, and I think each and every one of them is a legend. It is truly divinely orchestrated the coming together of all of us involved, what was just a fun game demo PONGslaught is being shaped into something the whole world will know, Sanctum Somnium. What is being made is far bigger than myself now, and I am honored to not just play a role in its creation, but have the highest honor of leading the charge.

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So what's been happening in the meanwhile? Besides the team growing, I have been pouring a lot of time into the custom game engine that will power this game: the Gravy Engine. Why gravy? As the discourse on game design has rapidly grown over the years, a couple related ideas have been forged in which I combine: Game Feel and Juiciness. Game feel refers to how the game feels to play (ex: controls, smoothness, "coyote time", etc) and Juiciness is the polish that makes a game feel more fun (ex: beefy sounds, screen-shake, hit-stop, knockback, effects, etc). These concepts are closely entwined but an umbrella term does not exist yet. I use the term "Gravy" to describe this combined idea, and so this term was chosen to represent my custom engine.

The Gravy Engine specializes in making games that feel great and look great, all at prototyping speeds! What started out as just an Entity Component System plugin for Godot has been expanded into something bigger, and has undergone extensive development behind the scenes. Here are the core design pillars, what makes it stand out:

• Juiciness and Game Feel: Adding polish and great-feeling controls are baked right in and simple to do.

• Ease Of Use: The editor is broken into several focused editors that specialize in various parts of the project, like image assets, sounds, dialogue, etc. No tech jargon either, formulas and concepts have been given beginner friendly names so that designers, beginners, or anyone wanting to learn how to make games can all understand what features are and do. To further aid in this goal all features of the editor have description info given when the mouse hovers over it, in a panel on the bottom of the screen. Documentation is also built-in, and an interactive tutorial for first-time users.

• Modular: There is no need to code anything -- several modules can be attached to your objects that take care of all the high-level concepts like inventory systems, gun logic, screenshake, and low-level granular ones like module grouping, signaling, input, etc. The extent of these modules is enough to cover creating any 2D game, and will keep growing over time. Still need something custom though? We got you covered, there is an editor for creating new modules. The module editor is very GUI based where it can be, so creating new properties is done through a visual interface, not code. The function code where coding is needed is gdScript, which is a pythonic language very easy to learn and master.

• Mod-able: Taking inspiration from OpenRA (An open-sourced Red Alert / Command & Conquer project) and the original DOOM games, I decided to follow their approach of making the entire game set up like a mod. This means that the whole game can be modified and changed by the modding community, making entirely new games not constrained by any of the base game's systems or features. Many decisions have been made toward embracing the modding community, including a built-in mod marketplace (so people playing the games can download mods for it right in the game itself, no third-party websites needed), saving module layouts as easy-to-read YAML-inspired text files, or even using the engine itself to go through game files and mod them in a more-user-friendly format.

• Gorgeous: This doesn't just mean making the engine editor good to look at and feel great to use, it should go without saying an engine that specializes in these things does feel and look great; A lot of time and research has been put into rendering tricks and algorithms that will make all games made with it look incredible. Some of the rendering hacks have been designed and created by myself, so there will be no equivalent in style anywhere.

• 3D Pixels: I have spent a lot of time on creating a custom pipeline to turn pixel-art into fully 3D rotatable objects, using a lot of experimentation and SDF (Signed Distance Field) wizardry. I wanted to combine the precision of pixel art and 3D rendering, and after years of scratching at the problem I found a way to do it! This approach also lets me take advantage of the many cool tricks you can do with palette-indexing based colors, and so I also added some very cool lighting techniques and color-ramp usage to make it look even better. This type of combination has never been done, and makes it an instantly stand-out feature among all the engines available.

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I plan to transition from engine-based work to the game Sanctum Somnium this summer, the engine's made a ton of progress over the long time I've been working on it behind the scenes. Work is being done toward the game too, although during this stage it's design and writing work. I have an incredible team of designers and a writer who delivers more twists and turns than the drive to Peggy's Cove (a Nova Scotia joke for ya).

And yes, the engine will be publicly available for all, in time, although it may be  a year down the road. I will post more about the engine publicly in this time of course, and I will start its public release by first giving the engine to use to a select number of game developers I believe can push the engine to do awesome things. This multi-stage release is to help me showcase what the engine can do when some of the most skilled people utilize it. I want its introduction to the world to be in the form of a wave of exceptional games powered by it.

This is to avoid the infamous Unity splash screen problem: because the way Unity set up itself in the past, where only the pros could afford to remove the Unity splash screen, the engine became associated with mediocrity because the Unity logo was only ever seen in amateur projects. I'm taking the opposite approach with the launch, since I do worry that the extreme ease of use could flood the market with mediocre games before the world gets to see the engine at its best. I hope people are understanding of this approach, but the silver lining is this for the juniors: You will get access to a game engine that has been proven to make great things, not just one that claims it can.

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That's all for now,

God bless and Cheers

Leo J LeBlanc
Ivory Lion Studio


[ Editor interface. Will show the 3D effect pipeline soon ]