Hello and welcome to a rainy Sunday Musings ! We have been polishing things a lot this week adding new things and refining what we have in so far.
This has been another busy week for us as we are now putting everything together and boy ain't things looking HOT! As our screen shot Saturday shows, Entering the first temple will be a trial by fire. I have been creating this scene all week and getting it game ready for Dan to implement. Now I know what you guys are thinking usually games do not start with the fire levels first but we feel out of the frying pan method for story and game design. With new levels means more optimizing and making the game run as well as possible on all devices (such as my no Gpu laptop). We want everyone to have the same experience from high end machines to my sad excuse for a laptop.(seriously it crashes playing the free game of bejeweled that came pre-installed but can run our game good lol).
From concept to modelling this Scene has stayed pretty much true to the concept's. I hope that the scale of the Scenes gives players a sense of scale the entire world yet to explore. I also added a new mesh for the first level in the forest a giant gate from the towns old outer walls. The town has an attack on titan vibe with outer walls emanating towards the temple showing the regression and retreat of the human race away from the temples. Dan was busy with reworking the mini boss battle that will be the end of the actual Forest/Tutorial area. This included plomping new animations and re writing some code for him. But all is playing better each time. Dan also put more animation on Evelyn that I had created such as push and pull for moving around blocks for triggers and switches. We have a good bit to do in the next week and it will be pretty much crunch time for us as.............................
WE ARE HEADING TO COX-CON. Not as rude as it sounds but its our first convention and we are showing off Reprieve for the first time to the public. True its pre alpha and one or 2 bugs and graphical issues may appear, but we are excited to see how things go.
So if you are traveling to Cox-Con be sure to pop over to us and say hi, we are nice and only bite on occasions. The du du diddly do's
Tune time and this week Dan has gone for Brand New with "The Quiet Things that no one Ever Know's"...... the title is huge.
I am going for "Starlight" by superman lovers. I loved this song growing up!
That's it for this Musings!!! We will be doing the next one from across the pond in the UK!
Until then! Have Fun!
It's time for Sunday Musings, some good stuff to talk about.
Copious Amounts of Work
There was no midweek blog this week, partly due to me being a smidgen busy and partly because I was clearly being lazy.
This week we've being doing all the things. I've been busy implemented animations which Adrian has sent on over to me this week for two different characters. The animator is starting to look super messy. What I wouldn't give for the ability to bend the transition nodes in Unity! I'm also still working on the boss battle with the demons. I'm trying to make sure that everything works solidly and there's no chance of things breaking at unfortunate times. I'm hoping to have the completed by the middle of next week. Still lots of work to do on it though. I also created a mesh combiner manager this week. This is to make combining meshes a little less time consuming...well, a lot less time consuming. So, in the town scene we've got nearly 150 houses, initially we had a massive amount of draw calls in the scene. There's a few ways to make this better. We went with mesh combining which combines meshes that have the same material. This means having to sort the meshes into sections rather than objects. So we've got Shingles, Drainage, Roof etc rather than "House" which meant a hell of a lot of work. The new script does this all automatically. First it finds all objects in the scene, then checks for objects with Mesh Renderers and what materials they have, constantly narrowing down the list until it gets to the final list which shows the number of instances of each material and the objects that use them. Then it, brings in prefabbed empty game objects with the mesh combine script on them, renames them to the material name and runs the mesh combine script. We've automated the whole process, essentially. There's a few small problems at the moment with the script at the moment which will have to be fixed, namely the material exceptions list isn't working properly and I haven't figured out what to do when a list exceeds the maximum amount of objects (this seems to be decided on a object by object basis rather than a set number, presumably polycount-based). Adrian worked like a man possessed this week, managing to get through a ton of stuff. First of all re-rigged and animated the mini-boss. The old rig wouldn't let Adrian add animations without it exploding in Blender, so a new rig was the only course of action. Evelyn also got some new animations this week. They're for things we forgot about on the last round of animations but they're done now. The animations are for pushing/pulling objects, wall-jumping and wall sliding. So far, wall jumping and sliding are in but need tweaking on how I've implemented them. Adrian also did some work on the level texturing this week. In this week's Screenshot Saturday, we had one of the forest levels which has now been textured. This was in an old screenshot saturday when it was untextured. Lots of work being done as you can see below:
We've a new grass shader in the game too which Adrian created which gives the effect of the grass blowing in the wind. The shader gives us the ability to change the amount that the grass moves.
He also created the banners for the town scene. The first few levels are tutorial levels, naturally and we're hoping to have the tutorials themselves be part of the scene rather than disrupting the game's flow. He also modelled and textured out Evelyn's window on her house which is how she gets to this particular scene.
Music!
Time for our songs of the week. Adrian's gone for "The Middle" by Jimmy Eat World. Absolutely awesome song.
I've gone for Mark Knopfler's "Haul Away". Nice relaxing song for a change! Adrian's: Jimmy Eat World - The MiddleDan's: Mark Knopfler - Haul Away
That's me for the week. Adrian will be back for Sunday Musings next week and, of course, his midweek blog. He's not a blog skipper like me...
Enjoy the rest of your weekend! |
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