Welcome to Bitrate Game’s first official blog post. We’re going to take you on an excursion where you can meet some of our team members and see their voyage through our pre-alpha build for Roswell’s Journey, a metroidvania where a robot magician, Roswell, is preventing the apocalypse from happening.

Joshua-Adams Villareal, owner of Bitrate Games LLC, conceptualized Roswell’s Journey in 2019 when him and a friend decided to start building the project. A couple years later, Joshua met up with the rest of us, shared his ideas, and we all decided to take the project full steam ahead.

With only 48 days into the major development of the game, we have made huge strides and we’re very excited to bring you the rest of Roswell’s Journey.

Be sure to wishlist Roswell’s Journey on Steam here.

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Hey everyone UwU, ’tis I, the Dizz. I’m super excited for this project as I get to work with all my friends! I’m one of the sound designers/music composers for Roswell’s Journey. This is a little playlist of songs made so far for our game. For these tracks I wanted to try and capture the feeling of the classic Megaman and Tomba games. Megaman, especially the Zero series, used a lot of synthy techno tracks mixed with a bit of 16 bit style music while Tomba tends to use a lot of environmental and experimental percussion which draws the player into the game world. 

 For Fun in the Sun, I wanted a song that reflected the beach scene and bright atmosphere of our gameplay. I used a combination of samples and midi to create this song. Watched our character bounce around a lot in the scene I was shown, so I wanted to make something super bouncy :3 

 For Overide, we wanted a boss theme and I knew immediately that we had to do some sort of drum ’n bass. The player had to feel an intense transition to a turning point in the game. My approach was to use a lot of high intensity patches for my synth plugin. Added a few sirens to emulate the Zero series (as you can probably tell is my favorite Megaman series ha). I liked to change every 8 bars but keeping something from the previous 8 bars to create a sense of continuation as this will likely play for a while as you go up against the boss. I also may or may not have referenced the Powerpuff Girl’s theme song, shh :). 

 For Down Under, which is our Sewer level track, I referenced both Megaman Legends 1 and Tomba 2. I really liked their use of metallic sounds for added percussion so I found some cool hammer sounds mixed with some pipe sounds. I created the drum pattern in Logic and then played in the rest. I felt this really adds a ton of atmosphere and another sound team member created the actual atmosphere soundscape and it sounds so beautiful! 

 Uhh… idk what else lol. I guess for the music nerds out there who want to know what I use: 

 LaunchKey25 MIDI Keyboard 

 KRK Rocket 5 Monitors 

 Logic Pro X DAW

 Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface 

 Massive Plugin

 Waves Plugin Studio

 Izotope Plugin Studio 

 Native Instruments Plugin Studio

 Sites that I think are great resources - (Splice.com)(eMastered.com) (https://freesound.org/) Thanks you guys ! Stay tuned for awesome stuff coming UwU !

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I was first tasked with making cutscenes for the game intro, the boss fight, the boss death (if there was time), and the game end scene for the demo. I found out that there was not really a level one in the editor to make these level sequences but a detailed script for what to expect within each of these scenes, so I was able to make a quick sketch for a visual storyboard of the first two scenes. (see Image below)

I then started working on making a blockmesh layout for the Beach Town level to make the next level sequence in. Getting the level ready for the next scene was easy but the level sequence had a lot of more assets to move, and I had to use different character animations to play at different times.

After getting the first two scenes at a spot that worked and easy enough to modify when needed I finished working on the level design for the rest of the beach town level.

I looked at a few level layouts from Megan Man ZX for some inspiration but without knowing the exact metrics of the player character I just designed a new player layout for onboarding player movement and combat before fighting the Crab boss in the Sewers.

The biggest challenge I had with the level design was getting the player to teleport to explore an alleyway. Rotating the player to move left/right on a different axis was not as simple as I thought it would be, I eventually got it to work when I figured out all the components on the player character that needed to be rotated 90 degrees and then reset when the player exits the alley. After getting the teleport player function to work correctly I implemented the same feature for going up stairs and going down into the sewers to explore more. I am happy with how it is coming along, and I am excited to add the player character and enemy NPCs to the level to test out the pacing next.

Video of full opening cutscene and beach town walkthrough:

- Nick Seay

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Hello, this is Vergil talking about grubbins here...

So

This is grubbins, a weird character to be precise and kinda fun to model.

Grubbins is a character that I got rather fond of while making due to it's unique physic. 

When modelling grubbins, I didn't quite see an issue with him until I got to his eyes... That's where I used shape keys and I learnt a lot about shape keys from that...

Rigging him, I got the name, the dancing worm while working on it (at least to give it a character)

In general, I learnt new things working on grubbins.

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Let's talk about this aerial AI. 

This enemy could use a navmesh to path find but this could cause problems down the road. Instead I have it check the path from itself to it's destination using a box trace and move by setting it's velocity. This allows me to avoid choosing a destination that is obstructed by obstacles such as other enemies or terrain and move anywhere without being constrained to a navmesh.

The destination is picked at random distances, clamped between a minimum and maximum distance, from an array of directions. 

We have two problems here. The first is that the destination could be anywhere that isn't obstructed by an obstacle. This means that if the location of the enemy isn't completely enclosed it could eventually end up way outside of the playable area or somewhere the player cannot reach it. The second is that we need to have the enemy movement constrained to either the XZ or YZ plane. 

I solved the first problem with some inspiration from a coworker that used an array of type Vector to get a platform to move between points in 3D space. I used two points that can be easily placed in the UE editor to specify max height, min height, min width and max width. Essentially you create a 2D rectangle area that the enemy can move within. 

The second problem came up when I solved the first. I discovered that when rotating the enemy 90 degrees, the two points are rotated as well. Now your XZ plane and your YZ plane are swapped. I solved this problem by creating a variable of type Enumeration that would switch the logic used to pick a direction. Now we treat our Y as our X and our X as our Y.

 Problem solved!

- Johnathan M

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Right now I'm working on creating a track for the Marketplace area. Its comming out pretty jazzy, which i think is what my brain defaults to when I'm trying to create a chill atmosphere. This is just a first draft, but I hope I succeeded at capturing a cozy vibe so far.

- Soccer Mom

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I completed illustrations/icons meant to go next to the health bars of the players and first boss. I’d say the difficult part was trying to capture the personalities of the characters. Rom and Roswell don’t have mouths or eyebrows, so most of their personality is communicated through the pose and lighting. With the story still being fleshed out, I kinda just took a stab at what the characters might be like. Roswell being dark and mysterious while Rom looks more playful/juvenile. I feel like their designs sort of lean that way, especially for Rom. Roswell might be a little too dark/mean looking, but that’s something that can be changed pretty quickly later on if the game designers go in a different direction for the narrative.

- Michael Karp

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Hi I'm Catherine and I’m a UI/UX(UE) designer for Roswell’s Journey. As you may know UI is implemented more towards the end of the build. But UX is crucial to be considered throughout the entire process. As for the pre-alpha build, I am designing and implementing the UI for Roswell’s Journey. Right now I’m working on the in-game menu, specifically the controls menu. For my portfolio I decided to design and create every component myself. For example, this PlayStation Controller for the Control Display.

One of the biggest lessons I learned while working on this game is sometimes you can get comfortable inside of the box. But for UI/UX you need to think outside of the box. So I gave myself a test as an artist, using different increments of time, as an asset for the game. So I put a 12 min, 1 hour, and 3 hour time limit on myself. These are what I came up with:

I highly recommend this practice for every UI/UX designer to do every once in a while because it helped me hone in my skills. It also reminded myself that its not that I do shotty work but rather I am overthinking in my process. I needed to step outside of the box once more, as well as gain more references in research. As you can see below, the last controller (made in 3 hours time) isn’t made up of many components, but it is showing the more commonly noticed details that matter. Changing the angle in which the user would be looking at the controller also made a huge difference, allowing the user to view every needed button instead, so the controls layout is more cohesive.

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We hope you enjoyed exploring our process and we hope you continue to join us on Roswell’s Journey.

To find other links for Bitrate Games and Roswell’s Journey or to sign up for our Newsletter for more updates, follow this link here.