June 2016 Status Update!

  Alrighty, things are shaping and coming up milhouse, but is it done yet? No! Almost.
All the levels are done, decorated, lit, tweaked, and continuously improved upon.

UI needs some further tweaking and all the levels will get more interesting secret areas while we keep adding missing sounds to every asset and event that needs it.

April 2016 status update!

Time for the monthly status update and this time with a little video to go along with it!
So what's new? Well, about 95% of the game's content is now done! It's been somewhat insane couple of months, but we actually did it.

The game is not completely finished yet as we still need to add some menu & progression functionality and go through a few polishing & fixing rounds with a bunch of bug fixing, but man, it's almost done!

New Gameplay Teaser!

We recently released a Gameplay Teaser and here it is:

   A lot of work went behind this version. We've wrapped up things feature-wise and have been focusing on stability, performance and playability. The game is now running smoothly at 60fps even on our lowest target device (iPad mini).

Most of our current levels have been re-worked to have more complex and interesting puzzles and of course we're working on new levels daily. We will be adding more graphical assets and new enemies still, but no more feature creeping is allowed!

Conveyor belt physics and UV tricks

I had a bit of a problem making a secure and fully functional conveyor belt line that moves any objects on top of it towards one direction at a certain speed, regardless of the object's mass. It should also do so with multiple stacked objects and dynamic moving objects such as the player character.

July project status

Time for an update! There's lots of things going on and as a result we've again neglected this blog because of it. We're crunching new levels every day while optimizing the code and assets and doodling new art, but what else is new?

Ragdolls

Everyone loves ragdolls! It's not like they're a necessity, but throwing enemies around with the GravGun looks stupid without them. We encountered some problems and found solutions to them and that's what this post is about.

Porting to Unity 5: lightmapping

(Post updated 21-2-2016! Scroll down for the updated info)
We decided to port the game to Unity 5 already because of the promised benefits of the new physics engine, nav mesh improvements among other things. It was quite a big task. We spent a lot of time planning the transition and researching the differences. Here's how it all went down...

Building the demo

   The closed demo is just about finished, and we've been testing the scenes vigorously, as well as asked a few friends try them out. So far the results are positive, but have also forced us to make some changes and fine-tuning to the gameplay. This will surely be an ongoing process as the testing continues, but its a good start!

March update

Our closed demo is due to be released next week to our friends and colleagues so we're working very hard on the build. This post is to highlight some of the major aspects of the process.

Outdoor assets update

I've been noodling with outdoor environment assets and scenes yet again. There's some new snazzy cliffs and rocks, terrain textures and tiles and a whole lot more is coming as we speak.

Gameplay video #2

There it is! (If for some reason it isn't showing, check your adblocker - had some problems with Firefox and simple ad-blocker)

Read on for the details...

The very first gameplay video is here!

We welcome you to enjoy the first pre-alpha gameplay video of Island Delta!
In the video you are able to see some of the features that are being worked on the game, plus few different surroundings, some enemies and the flow of the gameplay itself. Obviously its still just a very raw glimpse of the game with just basic mechanics, minimum amount of sound effects and just a handful of locations and different enemy types, but it should give you some idea of the style we are striving for.

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.

Enemy AI behavior

What makes the enemies tick? A lot more than two weeks ago, that's for sure.

Recent weeks have been focused mainly on game design, but there has also been some steps forward regarding the enemy AI. Few improvements to mention are that the enemies now react to sounds and suspicious noises, and seek to investigate their source.

Friday, it's full of animation

It's Friday and time for a party!

Actually this friday is to be spent on animation improvements among other things. The animation above was made just for fun. If you know the movie reference of those dance moves, you're alright! Read on...

Introducing the FixerBot unit

"FixerBot - He'll happily fix all the things you break!"

This unit is a fun one since it's not just another aggressive enemy. It's also far from being a passive decorative unit because it affects gameplay in many different ways: it can revive other bots that have been disabled and open doors that are impossible to open otherwise. That's not all of it though...

We're working on fun mechanisms that allow the player to hack FixerBots to manipulate the game surroundings in various ways. More of this later as things progress.

Just for fun, here's a video showing FixerBot working on a broken CraBot:

Unity 4.5 Animator improvement

Have to sync your animation event accurately to physics? It just got easier with Unity 4.5. Now you have this little extra parameter at your disposal:

"Updates the animator during the physic loop in order to have the animation system synchronized with the physics engine." - http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AnimatorUpdateMode.AnimatePhysics.html

Earlier we had a problem with syncing a climbing animation to rigidbody movement. It had to be frame accurate, but the animation would sometimes trigger one frame too early or too late. It was unpredictable.

Unity 4.5 to the rescue - the AnimatorUpdateMode worked its magic. Combining it with WaitForFixedUpdate() yields a nice solid result.

Small victories!

-Timo

Introducing the CraBot unit

This post is a small making-of about the first enemy unit we have in the game. There's also some ramblings about tools and workflow.

"Crabot is a standard enemy unit, a security robot that is found patrolling in various locations around the bases and labs of Island Delta. These crab-like contraptions use their claws with deadly accuracy and efficiency against all intruders."

The model and animations

CraBot was originally modeled and uv mapped in MODO 701. I personally like the modeling & uv mapping tools with some great 3rd party scripts to ease the process: