July project status update

Some of the new decals

It's almost the end of July and things are progressing, albeit slower than originally scheduled; real life has slowed things down temporarily and also it's the hottest month of the year right now so that takes a beer related toll on all of us. The situation is normalizing now though and tons of work has been done.

Edit (August 02): one of our screenshots is selected as Image Of The Day @GameDev.net screenshot showdown! How cool!

Winning screenshot showdown IOTD for today #gamedev http://t.co/KE5lqvuni4
— GameDev.net (@gdevnet) August 2, 2014

We've been working on pretty much everything related to the game such as design, mechanics, backstory, characters, assets and even some sound work. We noticed that some of the core functions of the game were actually not as functioning as they should be, so there has been a lot of planning and re-tweaking some key features.

Now let's get specific...'ish.

The visuals

I've been working on 3d models, decals and lighting for different environment locations. I'm especially happy about the decals - they bring color and contrast to otherwise somewhat monochromatic environments. I'm using Decal System Pro for placing the decals in the scenes because it's just awesome.

I've also heavily optimized the assets, cutting down polygon count, combining texture atlases to lower the drawcalls, etc. Lightmapping is also getting better in each scene. I currently have four different lighting schemes done:

1. The low-contrast blue-ish indoors lighting:

2. Bright indoors:

3. Outdoors, lots of sunshine:

4. Dark, moody, lots of contrast and saturation:

There's going to be more lighting themes as more levels are built.
I save reusable lights as prefabs and add ambient and fog colors to the library for quick access. I just wish baking was done in HDR...

-Sami

Tech stuff and game design

I'm still questioning whether to stick with the navigation system that Unity provides, or get acquainted with the A* pathfinding system. Personally I'm beginning to feel that the NavMeshAgent system is like CharacterController component: easy to use but rather basic.

There were some issues where opponents didn't really look very efficient when moving along the calculated path (turning way too slow and bumping into walls etc) but most of those issues were resolved by tweaking the numbers. Still, the aftertaste of it all is rather blunt because the system is missing some deeper, in-depth controls and functions.

A link to a 2.4mb .gif file

Plans have also been set up to make the first video of the game as soon as possible, which will give you a more broad glance of what the game will actually be like. No date has been decided yet but we'll expect it to be ready within a month or so.

-Timo


Once again thank you for reading and keep coming back!