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Dev Diary #9: One week off :)

Posted on March 25, 2014 by RobinComments Off on Dev Diary #9: One week off :)

Good morning boys and girls! We have to take some time off the Mercury Shift 3D and finish a different project.

So this week we still had some great stuff going on. The gamedesigners finished their work on the canyon levels, which means they are ready for art integration.

Part of the improvements added to the game lately is a new camera-orientation system. Although Mic has finished his work on that, Oli integrated it now in every level. It allows smoother controls over the camera. To implement the system, Oli, Beff and Matt worked out a set of rules for the camera. Visibility of points of interest, player movement and such things are considered in these rules.

Camera movement is one of those things that will not necessarily be noticed by every player. The only exception here being a bad camera movement system, which will throw you off the game-flow. Maybe you will spot the difference in this video. We have parallel-played a level with the new and with the old system. Although barely noticeable if you do not focus on it, it makes a difference in play.

The players are now able to see, where they are jumping and certain areas of interest can be shown to the player.

Relentless Mic has been collaborating with Simon to work with the death-areas. I am pretty excited about that collaboration, as Mic being a great coder and Simon a shader wizard. This time the two worked on the display of death-areas. They are a pretty important part of the game, as players will be confronted with them quite a lot. They come in a lot of different sizes, which makes it complicated to find an applicable visual interpretation that can be re-sized to all of your needs. You would have to create a lot of different assets for every application of the death-area.

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Dev Diary #8: Loud Pipes

Posted on March 17, 2014 by RobinComments Off on Dev Diary #8: Loud Pipes

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Good monday everyone!

We will be starting off this post with some work of Simon. As the Shadermagician and Feedbackwizard on duty he improved the special coin a little further. The coins now all have some additional “juice” to them, as in a small burst effect when being collected. The special coin does have a very similar effect, just a bit bigger. But see for yourself:

As the players have to face some obstacles, Niko worked on concepting some of the death areas. Usually we like to have them represented by dangerous objects and such, but as the sizes of the areas vary a lot, this has proven difficult. Thus Niko sketched an idea for a more generic death area:

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These little bots are part of a red force field that generates a deadly zone for players. They will be patrolling the area. Although being still at a concept stage, this is what it could look like:

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Devdiary #7: Sparksies

Posted on March 8, 2014 by RobinComments Off on Devdiary #7: Sparksies

We skipped the last update as there was going on a bit more than usual. It was a busy week. And this post is also a bit different as I am writing this during my train ride from Lyon to Munich. Returning from the Cartoon Movie festival where we spent our time talking to cartoon producers about the possibilities of working with games to enrich the content of their projects.

The latest build kept us busy as we have been sending it out to a few people to gather feedback on the whole thing. So far it was well received and we are happily working with the gathered feedback.

Apart from the invisible process of evaluation and documentation of feedback that arose from the build, there has been some very visual stuff going on. Simon worked on particles for sparkles such ambient effects for the newly created training levels. The levels set in a darker environment, so playing with lightsettings and effects really works well.

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For instance these light rays coming through the vents and creating a certain kind of atmosphere would not be
possible in a different kind of environment. But there have been more changes to the levels.

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Dev Diary #6: Interference

Posted on February 24, 2014 by RobinComments Off on Dev Diary #6: Interference

“Your game is shipping in 3 days. What has to be added to make it work?”

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Although this is not the actual situation for us, the statement (or question for that matter) helped us quite a bit in this week.

So there is this opportunity to show the game to somebody in the industry, who possibly will be able to propel it much further. That’ s pretty awesome, but at this point the game is not ready for shipping. We are working on a vertical slice and are not even halfway through this vertical slice. So the project is not in a perfect state for deployment to an external reviewer, to be honest.

Thus we had a meeting in which we discussed, what the most important things to include in the version to ship would be. A bunch of things were mentioned, to get the game “feel” right. The game should work and feel at least close to that what we will be shipping in the end.

Maybe some hours on the weekends will be spent to further improve the build, but it seems like we will get it done tonight.

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It’s interesting to see what kind of things pop up as soon as you actually have to send it. Usually you’re always part of the playtest. There is always the possibility for us to say “oh that’s not ready yet. We will be adding XYZ to improve.” and so on. But now, with an upload and download, there is no one explaining the game and maybe helping someone who is stuck at some point. No chance. So what should we do?

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Dev Diary #5: No texture. Such Polygon.

Posted on February 14, 2014 by RobinComments Off on Dev Diary #5: No texture. Such Polygon.

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Another week, another update. This week in development has been pretty exhausting, as we are encountering a few difficulties and some tasks became tedious to work with.

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Lightmapping is still a big challenge, to be honest. When coming from software like 3ds Max, Beast for Unity offers good results, but behaves a bit like a black box. There are a lot of settings to change, but it takes a lot of time to see the effect of that.

On top of that, Beast seams to crash when baking selected objects for no visible reason. Quite possibly the fault is on our side, but at the moment we cannot reproduce it reliably and file a bug report. We’d really like to contribute to the fixing of this stuff…

But enough of the bad news! On to the gifs and stories.

Mic has been working on the so called “wires”. Wires connect objects and show the relation of those objects. For example a pressure plate is connected with the associated door.This helps player to orient within the game and understand the puzzles. The riddles should be readable and easy to understand. So when creating the art for the levels, we are mostly working within Unity3D, instantiating the already imported assets and placing them. So most of these assets are used multiple times to reduce drawcalls and overall performance. As the riddles tend not to be the same over and over again, wires themselves are similar, but each single wire is unique. Creating them and importing them would take some time and make the process very inflexible.

wire tool splines in unity

So Mic created a node-based tool in which the end points of those wires can be set and chamfered. A process we know from most 3D software. The wires can now be refined within Unity. Mesh is generated with UVs already applied and so Simons great shader can do its magic on the wires.

moving energy shader in unity

Simon has added some shader magic, and boom: it looks cool. More images after the jump.

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