Category: Game Development (page 2 of 4)

2 Weeks Until Rezzed

March 21, 2017 / / Comments Off on 2 Weeks Until Rezzed

My main priority this week (or the first day or two) will be completing my wormhole upgrade, complete with smoother transitions and loading. With any luck it’ll just be a few hours, but I seem to have introduced some new bugs at the same time.

Then I’m back onto a bit of story related stuff, and after that I might reassess what to do next for this Rezzed build.

Monday

  • Smooth wormhole transitions ~6 hrs
  • Fixing new WH related bugs ~2 hrs

“Pro” coding tip and OMGTHX to Mr Rhys Lindsay, our EXO ONE musician:

  • If you start a coroutine from one script on another, ie “StartCoroutine(AnotherScript.instance.thing())” and then destroy your scipt/unload the scene, your coroutine will be destroyed, and you will wonder for HOURS why the helllll said coroutine fails to continue…!
  • Instead, Anotherscript.instance.StartCoroutine(OMGitWorks!());

Tuesday

Cleaning up from yesterday. Wormholes mostly working as intended now. Didn’t really get the nice super smooth transitions I wanted by loading the next level in the wormhole, but I think that is perhaps a much bigger task than I realised.

  • Wormhole clean up completed, bugs removed ~3 hrs
  • Fixing up overlays a bit when wormhole camera comes on, but still a very average solution. Think I might need some kinda ‘overlay’ camera that handles all my post processing! ~1hr
  • Fixed random sound loss on first planet ~30 mins
  • Tutorial tweaks ~30 mins
  • A whole bunch of other tweaks, now that everything is working again! ~2 hrs
    • Profiling/fixing some resource hogs
    • Fixed wrong ground contact sound in tutorial
    • Added wormhole exit effects to 2nd planet
    • etc

So, happy to report game is buildable and pretty much bug free.

Wednesday

Going to profile the game a bit and see how the frame rate is, if there’s any easy wins to make it smoother. Noticed some frame hiccups near monoliths, for example…

  • Sole remaining bugs:
    • Null ref on some sounds. ~30mins
    • Somehow at some point, the ParticlePlayground (plugin) manager disappeared from the wormhole scene, which meant I couldn’t turn it back on… Took me ages to realise this! ~2hrs…!
    • Then I wrestled unsuccessfully with why, in editor, the wormhole transition looks fine, but colors break in the build… ~2hrs
    • Similar to above where the entire game start screen was broken in build but not editor… ~1hr

Sucky day!

Thursday

  • Wasted another day in town waiting for my car to be re-repaired (they didn’t fix it the first time…)
  • Now I need to hunt down why there’s issues with my build, but not the editor. Checking:
    • Player log for any errors. Went in and fixed some warnings just in case.
    • Noticed maybe we weren’t in the right quality setting… That wasn’t it.
    • Logs pointed to my scene loading stuff, realised the intro scene wasn’t loading. Put in a million debug lines.
    • Tracked it down to (I guess due to load speeds between build and editor) the wormhole scene not finishing loading in time and messing up a coroutine sequence
    • 2 hrs
  • Perhaps not overly wise (I don’t know?) I updated the camera system to reduce the amount of cliff/ground staring you can do sometimes! Still needs fine tuning but liking the result ~2hrs.

Friday

Indiecade E3 deadline is tomorrow, and I’m wondering whether to submit to that or not.

Pros:

  • Might have less competition with other submissions because it’s the earliest submission date
  • Could send it and ‘forget it’/not spend more time on event/award submissions for a while.

Cons:

  • Potentially lower my chances of being selected because I have less time to improve the game
  • Barely enough time right now to test the build

I’m going to work assuming I’ll submit for the e3 deadline, then see where I get up to and make a decision tonight/tomorrow morning.

Tasks for tonight’s deadline

  • Restarting levels/game is a bit broken. Perhaps not a massive problem, especially if I make a note to restart the exe instead, I dunno. Not a great foot to put forward… “my game is broke so don’t press THIS button”.
    • Had a huge amount of trouble getting this to work in wormholes as I was async loading the next level in the wormhole, and you can’t cancel async operations… Gave up on pause in wormhole! ~3 hrs wasted
    • Checking normal pause/restart stuff working ~1 hr
  • Perhaps minor color bug when we enter a wormhole in the tutorial. Ignoring!
  • Decide whether to fix or remove some new ‘story-like’ feature in the 2nd world (don’t want to spoil) which isn’t 100% working. Fixed this, took ages ~3 hrs
  • Fine tune new camera stuff or just use old one?
    • Had a play and had the new stuff working quite fast so sticking with new ~30 mins
  • Not obvious enough ‘objective arrow’. Use some combination of:
    • Text/blinking text (at least at start/level load, then turn off). “Energy signature”.
    • Start the arrow size large/blinking then quickly reduce size.
    • ~1 hr (still not obvious enough!)
  • Final testing
    • Picked up lots of restart level/restart game issues. Restart level I removed completely as I was stumped and had no time left. ~2 hrs
    • Numerous other tweaks to planets, UI, sound, etc, etc. ~2 hrs
    • Profiling for frame rate issues ~1 hr
    • Playing through the entire build many many times ~2 hrs.

I ended up pulling an all-nighter to get this finished before the deadline. I still had ~4 hours before the deadline, but I opted to work all night just in case it came down to the wire.

Also quite badly underestimated how much work was required for the Indiecade submission in terms of text. They needed ~300 word answers to a bunch of questions, and that was rather hard at 5-6 am.  Took me another hour or two.

Now going to take a day or two off to recharge before Rezzed!

3 Weeks Until Rezzed Countdown

March 13, 2017 / / Comments Off on 3 Weeks Until Rezzed Countdown

Last week I created a fully playable build that I submitted to Amaze and Momocon that I could take with me to Rezzed. So on the one hand, I could decide to use that and focus more on long-term tasks, but at the same time there’s not much downside if I work on some stuff and either don’t complete them or the build breaks at the last minute or whatever.

Rezzed build tasks this week

The current weak points I’m thinking of trying to bring up are:

  • Loading between scenes/wormholes is a bit janky still.
    • Harsh cut-off in audio between scene loads
    • No fading in/out (need to develop a system that can be used in many situations)
    • Kinda two different wormhole effects, need to adjust the old to match the new
  • 3rd person camera not handling non-terrain objects at all. Don’t like my chances of fixing this but will have a go for a day at least.
  • Still unsure if I should change up the tutorial level.
  • Occasional performance issues

In terms of just adding more stuff, I find it a little hard to prioritize. Maybe:

  • Story related stuff (won’t elaborate cos spoilers)
  • Third planet

Wot I Gone Got Done On Mon

  • Added story stuff and system for unique cutscenes on each planet ~2 hrs
  • Removed ability to endlessly jump in clouds ~15mins
  • Rezzed trailer changes based on feedback ~1 hr
  • Fixed lightning sounds in clouds ~15 mins

Tuesday

Zero done – had car problems, needed to take to the service shop for the day.

Wednesday

  • Trailer Mk2 ~2hrs
  • Story sequence stuff ~2 hrs
  • Emailing journalists and YouTubers for Rezzed ~4 hrs

Here’s the teaser for Rezzed. This went over pretty well and is looking to soon have over 100 likes and 20 RTs:

Thursday

  • Fixed crappy tutorial camera. Made it follow faster (easier to keep track of where we are) and fixed the collision with walls. You used to be able to see through walls…! 1hr
  • Better wormhole transitions (required a bit of reworking of a bunch of stuff) ~2hrs
  • Improved tutorial sequence so it’s more focused. All text/directions are just top center without the fluff/distraction text on the left. ~30 mins
  • Had a great meeting with Adelaide’s Emilia Chignola (IGDA/Two Lives Left) and Carmine Fantarella (Icebox/Games of Edan) about my game, plans, Rezzed plans, PR/marketing stuff, etc. Two of the most helpful and nicest peeps I’ve met! ~2.5hrs

Friday

Noticed the earliest IndieCade deadline is rolling around in a week… Can’t believe it’s almost been a year since I submitted last! I’ll definitely put something together, but not sure which deadline.

  • Completing wormhole transitions. This was a far bigger task than anticipated, needed to rework how all the level loading worked…! About 95% the way to finished, though. Took all day!

 

Weekly EXO ONE Dev Log 3-3-2017

March 3, 2017 / / Comments Off on Weekly EXO ONE Dev Log 3-3-2017

So the big completed tasks last week were the story (for Rezzed anyway), voice acting, wormhole art, flights booked for Rezzed and accommodation sorted. Inserting the narration should be pretty straightforward, my biggest task will just be getting the wormholes integrated properly. This might take a couple hours or a couple days!

Planned Tasks This Week

  • Wormhole transitions ~1 day
  • PR leading up to Rezzed ~2 days
  • Integrating new voice over narration ~  1 day
  • Submit game to some upcoming game events/competitions
  • More tweaks to second planet ~ 1 day

Monday

  • Engage crunch mode for 30th March event submissions :/
  • Wormhole transitions completed ~3 hrs
  • Wormhole narration based on current progression, complete ~30 mins
  • New demo end point complete ~30 mins
  • Testing latest build ~30 mins
    • shared with musician, Rhys Lindsay for second planet music score
  • Planet 2 ~ 2hrs
    • Unique intro
    • Optimizing biomes
    • New music added
  • New narration in ~2 hrs
  • Build testing ~1hr

Pretty great day!

 

Tuesday

  • Final push before submission to Amaze and Momocon
  • Changed music from endless looping to play, then silence, then play once more 2 minutes later. Also removed music from tutorial.
  • Tweaks to planet 2 as it was somewhat repetitive and flat
  • Shortened both levels for Rezzed and event submissions. Unsure how long to have each planet go for! I think ‘good’ players will knock off a level in 5 minutes, while maybe new players will take 2x that.
  • Testing ~2 hrs
  • Various other tweaks… all day :P
  • Submitted to both events

Wednesday

  • Boring tax hell ~3 hrs
  • PR stuff ~4 hrs

In gross hot weather. Worst day ever!

Thursday

  • More PR stuff!
  • Some poster planning for Rezzed
  • Redoing higher rez logo
  • Updated presskit

Friday

  • PR… …. stuff! (not my favorite week ever) ~2 hrs
  • New, short trailer for Rezzed ~3 hrs (just gotta think about when to time release on this)
  • Returning to work on the Rezzed build ~2 hrs

Kinda boring week in general with so much time spent just emailing people, organising Rezzed, tax, etc. And the Amaze/Monocon applications kinda killed me as I stayed up really late finishing them. Would have been nice to have a new screenshot or gif to share at least! Hopefully next week I’ll have that poster or trailer or new music to share.

 

EXO ONE Weekly Dev Log 27-2-2017

February 27, 2017 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE Weekly Dev Log 27-2-2017

Some news – I’m flying to Rezzed in London, boom! With some help from a very gracious family member, I’ll be heading over for the event and will be making the most of it while I’m there, and hope to meet some new friends, players, developers and press. I lived in London for a year (a few years back) and kinda only made a couple of contacts, but it’s amazing how much help just a couple of people can be. Especially when they have some experience under their belt.

Well, after a slow one last week, my weekly task list isn’t dissimilar to last!

Planned Tasks

  • Schedule out Rezzed, buy flights, book accommodation, contact people I’ll be meeting over there. 1 day.
  • Finishing touches to story. Might actually add a day to this to get some final feedback. 1 day.
    • Send story off to voice actor.
  • Wormhole transitions. This will take as long as I kinda want it to… So far there’s just a super simple wormhole effect, and for time’s sake I might keep it this way for now and just make sure it works 100%. Currently it is quite janky. 1 day.
  • Contacting some games press pre-Rezzed.
  • If all goes well, finishing Planet 2 (art/level design) 2 days.

Monday

Wot I did:

Tuesday

  • Press and PR company emails ~1hr
  • Story fine tuning + contacting voice actor ~ 2.5 hrs
  • Changing the tutorial level slightly due to story reasons! ~2 hrs
  • Booking flights, AirBNB, etc. 1 hr

Wednesday

  • Hugely blown out task rearranging the story slightly in the tutorial level (all day + night…!)

Thursday

  • Submitted @RhysLindsay’s music for EXO ONE to IndieCade’s soundwall ~1hr

  • More tweaks to narration/story in tutorial level ~ 2hrs
  • Wormhole FX ~1hr
    • Wormhole video to Twitter ~15 mins
    • Sound effects ~30 mins
    • Integrating with existing level loading system ~

  • Meeting ~1hr

Friday

  • Rezzed PR prep work ~3hrs
  • Rezzed planning ~1hr
  • Biz card design/ordering ~1hr
  • T-Shirt time wasting I mean design (I did some stuff I didn’t like then just went with the EXO ONE logo…) ~1.5hrs
  • More wormhole sounds ~30mins
  • Integrating wormholes into level transitions ~1hr

Rezzed related planning took up a bit of my head space this week but made some decent progress. My nerves leading up to Rezzed will be calmed just as soon as you can play the game through to the second planet, wormholes, narration and all. Hoping this week will be the week, then I can just tweak things!

Rezzed Goals, PR/Marketing, Story

February 17, 2017 / / Comments Off on Rezzed Goals, PR/Marketing, Story

I’m going to work towards making this blog more interesting for people to read, which means:

a) less updates (some days not much happens, or boring things!)

b) more in each post, with the fluff cut out. Or, all the same fluff in, but perhaps I’ll reduce the text/bullet size or make it expandable if you care.

c) more time spent editing/crafting less posts = a better read.

I’ll therefore edit this post as I go from Monday morning and it’ll come out near the end of the week.

Pre-Rezzed Goalz

  • My terrible stand-in voice to be replaced with a voice actor’s (2-3 days of back and forths perhaps)
  • Some story/narrative tweaks (2-3 days). Will see if I can get any ‘quick wins’. Story will most likely change more after Rezzed so I’m not going to go crazy with this now.
  • Improve tutorial level somewhat. Probably greatly increase its size so it more closely matches the planets (right now it’s one small room). Add a skip tutorial button, incase people wanna get on with it. 3-4 days.
  • Finish Planet 2. 4-5 days.
  • Planet 1 to Planet 2 transition (wormhole). 3-4 days.
  • Sort out what I’ll be doing for PR for Rezzed Leftfield. Shouldn’t be a huge amount of my time… 1-2 days?
  • Final testing. 2-3 days.

This all comes out to about 4-5 weeks. Rezzed is in 9 weeks, which lets me do the classic doubling of my time estimates ‘because game development’. The weakest point of the game (my voice over) will be brought wayyy up, and the second planet introduced, which are the two main things. If I get the rest done, that’s a bonus.

This week’s EXO ONE Goalz

  • I’ve been lining up meetings with some PR people/companies and will be chatting with them this/next week.
  • I’ve also seen a couple of publishers who I think might be a good fit. However, I’m not totally sold on the concept of having one, but I think I need to chat with them and see if they can change my mind. So I’ll try and line up chats with them.
  • Since I’ll be working with a voice actor, I’ll work first on the story/lines of dialog (2 days) before handing those over. Then, while I wait to get the audio back (and maybe revisions) I can carry on with:
  • Planet 1 to 2 transition. Since I’d be happy-ish showing Planet 2 in its current state, I’ll first make sure the planet 1 to 2 wormhole works. That might take me the rest of the week, interspersed with the above + pr related stuff. If I get it done quickly, then I improve Planet 2.

Mid Week Progress

Talking Rezzed

I haven’t been super productive with a whole lot of uncertainty surrounding if/how I’ll be going to Rezzed. I’ve ended up contacting not only a couple of existing contacts in the UK, but also PR and other people who have been to Rezzed in the past, to try and get their thoughts. A sampling of advice I’ve received and things I’ve learned:

  • Don’t go to events if it’s a huge chunk of your budget, but
  • It’s super important for building relationships with press, developers and publishers.
  • You’ll never make a return on investment by going to events.
  • There’s far less chance your game will be covered if you aren’t there and you aren’t lining up meetings.
  • Press probably won’t talk or meet with you if you haven’t built relationships with them already.
  • You can just pull in press who walk by!
  • OMG PR is so expensive.
  • PR was totally worth it
  • PR did nothing for us
  • Advice is super conflicting :)

EXO ONE Story

In between emailing people, I’ve been looking at the story and trying not to rewrite it ‘completely’ and just tweak some stuff. I’m not a super experienced writer, and I have a good idea what kinda story I want, but feel a bit of a gap between where the story is and where I want it to be. I’ve gone two days over schedule already working on this, so I definitely have to move on tomorrow.

I’ve had some interesting new ideas, which is good. Also tightened up and fixed a bunch of stuff which was far more obvious after having time away.

End of Week Wrap

Well, this week was unfortunately not among my most productive. Again as I’m not a writer, I wonder how normal it is to spend long amounts of time just in thought, not actively doing much, just thinking/trying to come up with stuff. The story for EXO ONE is highly restrictive in some ways but unlimited in others, and I find it hard to reach good solutions for certain problems. Having said that, I feel like I’ve just come up with some decent stuff this Friday afternoon. A re-read tomorrow/Monday will determine if I still like it, though.

Didn’t even start on the wormhole/planet transition stuff as I’m still not quite happy with the story. If I like it on Monday, I’ll polish it a little more and send it to my voice actor, then move onto wormholes for realz!

Have a good weekend!

EXO ONE end of week update – 10 Feb 2017

February 10, 2017 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE end of week update – 10 Feb 2017

Have been scrambling about doing all sorts of stuff this week after hearing EXO ONE would be at Rezzed. Partially getting over excited maybe, but also wanting to maximize the opportunity and make the game look its best for the end of March. So to that effect I’ve been:

  • Sweating in the 40C heat here in Adelaide with no air con in my office
  • Improving both planets
  • Finalizing the height map for Planet 2
  • Working on final details/grass/rocks etc for Planet 2
  • Had a ‘breakthrough’ realisation of how we can more easily see through clouds and keep our bearings at the same time
  • Emailing a swathe of people I know in game dev, generally asking for their thoughts about the whole Rezzed thing and how I should handle it (since I probably won’t be flying over)
  • Turning up my PR/Marketing efforts. Mostly feels like to no effect whatsoever, lol. Either I’m bad at it or it just takes a far bigger, longer concerted effort than I think! Made me think of Jacob Leichty’s (from Astroneer)Tweet:

I’m pretty sure people care about your game Jacob, stop complaining, omggg!! :)

For my marketing troubles last week (I probably spent almost 2 solid days doing nothing but…) I gained 3 newsletter subscribers and a handful of Twitter followers. Boom! It also seems that Reddit somehow dislikes me about as much as I dislike it…! I’m joking, I love Reddit, I just hate posting anything to it, because I get downvoted and comments like this:

redditshit

Somehow nothing I ever post there gets any love at all. I feel like Reddit is like this:

“You did something great? You’re personally telling us about it? Go away!!”

However… if…

“My friend did this and now that happened and OMG isn’t that amazing?!” Upvote!!!

Ok, end of rant. Back to work. I officially abandon all Reddit hope lol.

Thanks for following!

Morning Promotion + More Planet 2 + Twitch Streamers

February 6, 2017 / / Comments Off on Morning Promotion + More Planet 2 + Twitch Streamers

Planned Tasks:

  • PR/Marketing (half the day)
    • I’ve made a couple EXO ONE planet making-of videos but not really promoted them much.
    • Post both on IndieDB
    • Post a newsletter informing subscribers that new daily dev logs exist, + new videos
    • (On the weekend I also posted the vids to the Map Magic unity forum)
    • Force self to post them on Reddit (Reddit scares me, prob just cos of all the rules and all the touchy self-promo haters)
  • I’m thinking of also pinning a new post to my Twitter, which is something like, “here’s exo one (animated gif/video?), subscribe to the newsletter here”.
  • Continuing Planet 2 (the other half of the day)

Wot I did

  • Shared the youtube vids around on everything from StumbleUpon to IndieDB
  • Wrote this Twitter post about Pinned Tweets from Top Developers.

  • “Wasted” lots of time getting the above image in my tweet to actually show up…! As well as adding Yoast and a few other sorely needed things to the blog.
  • Went down a marketing rabbit hole that took half a day in research
    • Updated my PR/Marketing docs with a few things learned on my rabbit hole journey
  • BTW, promoting and sharing even the shortest article takes a lot of time, omg! Also, I hate pressing submit/send/share every single time.
  • Signed up for some game dev Slack groups to see what they were about
  • Since it’s now late I’m just going to do some Twitch ‘research’ and watch some game devs I noted down last time I was on William Chyr’s stream
  • Lol at the title of this blog post

Twitch Streamers

In case you’d like to check these people out, I’ve been recommended all these guys:

https://www.twitch.tv/williamchyr

https://www.twitch.tv/xra_

https://www.twitch.tv/qazitv

https://www.twitch.tv/lachhhandfriends

https://www.twitch.tv/nonplayercat (no videos here, hmmm. They don’t want people watching after the stream ends?)

….

Night night!

How top game devs Pin their Tweets

February 6, 2017 / / Comments Off on How top game devs Pin their Tweets

pinnedTweets

As I have marketing on the brain for EXO ONE, I’m simply looking at a range of Twitter accounts I follow to see how they take full advantage of anyone arriving at their Twitter profile.

Da Pinz

William Chyr pins Manifold Garden’s Steam store page with a video. Call to action? “Add it to your wishlist” so you’re notified when it comes out.

Team Cherry totally copies William Chyr, OMG!:

Astroneer delivers a space-themed “out now, go buy it!” pin, showing the game name, what the game is about, and where to get it, boom!

While Tom Francis is so attractively successful he promotes Ubisoft instead of his games:

Ooblets prompts you to sign up to their newsletter/mailing list, linking to their home page, which features the sign-up form top/center. They also throw in the games logo/screenshot + one line description, nice!:

Finji, loving their political Tweets lately, pins this one up front and center (P.S. how long till a politically inspired game? Or is Overland “post-Trump America?!”)

Mr William Pugh (OMG, look at that amazing hair!) blams a Youtube video to the top of his Twitter account, featuring their cray-cray VR game, in collab with @squanchtendo. I wish *I* could be told by the Rick and Morty creator to fuck off in VR, but I lack the Vive! These guys have so much marketing punch they can name their game the complete opposite of what it is, nice! Kinda like me with EXO ONE eh?!

OK I need some variety to finish this off…

Lawl, here’s Luke Muscat’s. Again, perhaps only doable/recommended if you have a big name like his:

Mr Nicoll “The Beard” Hunt shares some wisdom only possible through beardedness, earning him a hefty 1800 retweets for his efforts. I’m going to totally copy him and pin this article and see what happenz. On Twitter, so often your followers are other game developers, so this is certainly a nice way to corral support, by helping your fellow devs/offering advice/tips.

Now, to actually finish this post… Pin all your updates and give them a fancy ‘update name’ + subtle animated gif. So classy!

Anyone got any they think are particularly clever? Or your own? Comment or something!

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Distraction Levels, Huge. More Planet Making.

February 3, 2017 / / Comments Off on Distraction Levels, Huge. More Planet Making.

Due to some (good!) news I can’t announce just yet, my distraction levels lately have been rather huge, so I’m not getting a lot done.

So I thought I’d do another planet making video.

Planetary Planning:

  • Focus is on the clouds for this planet, so won’t go too crazy with terrain. We are probably aiming to be airborne at least half the time on this planet, so the terrain is a little less of a focus.
  • Need to make sure the player isn’t going to be ramming higher altitude terrain while inside clouds, so keeping things low/smooth.
  • Consider what terrain is good for constant, fast, 1-directional movement.
  • Today mostly tackling a Mars-style, high-speed wind affected terrain using line nodes and noise masks. Check out:

Video

Action! (the video recording software) or my computer shafted me and I lost most of the first take, so here’s a 2nd one, using NVidia ShadowPlay (thanks for the suggestion, Mr @CFantarella).

Flora

I know some frozen rock is unlikely to have much in the way of living flora, but yknow… SPACE! Who knows how these plants live!! Plus, moving grass shows high speed wind nicely.

I checked out some of the fastest moving water/water plants on earth and saw this long flowing and endangered Texas grass:

Also saw a lot of interesting super long seagrass/seaweed, and wondered if I could replicate it somehow. Collisions with long flowing grass probably wouldn’t happen, but at the same time, I’m not sure I care that much. I’d rather the cool looking flowing plants (which probably wouldn’t affect movement anyway) and zero collisions. Indie game dev! Boom! Anyway, this might be a tough ask depending on the scale I go for. I’ll see what I can rustle up.

Things to try:

  • 3D plant models made from Blender. Probably multiple big sheets, to which I add a tiling grass texture, x and y, for rezzz.
  • 2D billboards, but much smaller scale, don’t know if I can even get them to follow the wind direction I want.

Results:

  • Can’t use grass, it doesnt take wind zones into consideration. It just flaps about aimlessly.
  • Made a custom tree and messed around with it for an hour or so to get this:

exo one space grass

The main problem with this is, we can’t really animate it like flowing grass. So it just kinda sways oddly like a tree. Maybe I need to get my hands on a line renderer type of thing… Unsure I’ll keep this.

Tweaking Terrain

Spend another couple hours making the rivers better, the lighting better (now we can see the ground more easily) and the sky/nebulae a little clearer:

rivertweaks

And then back onto the grass again for another hour, and so it went until it was ridiculously late and I got too carried away tweaking things! Looking back at the grass stuff again in that screenshot I think it actually looks alright, hummm. Will see what it looks like to me on Monday morning!

Bye!

More PR + Ice Planet Making-Of Video

February 2, 2017 / / Comments Off on More PR + Ice Planet Making-Of Video

Planned Tasks

  • Continue through Game to Market eBook and ensure I have a well-rounded plan to take to my consultant. 4 hrs
  • Upload teaser for EXO ONE to Facebook (mostly to see how many views it might generate) 15 mins
  • Begin Planet 2 terrain (replacing placeholder terrain). Possibly film for Youtube. 3 hrs

PR/Marketing

After going off on wayyy too much of a Kickstarter tangent (though not entirely unrelated to EXO ONE’s marketing), I covered some of the following:

  • Communication channels (ie Facebook, email, Twitter, etc)
    • What to post, when, topic ideas
    • Earned vs free coverage options
  • Kickstarter marketing
  • Read a crap load of stuff that took ages.
  • Watched this video:

Which was in this excellent article by IndieWolverine on Kickstarters: http://indiewolverine.com/2016/02/01/video-game-kickstarter-tips/

Planet 2 Terrain

I’m going to try recording a video of this just to see what it’s like, but may not actually share it (will see!).

Here’s some reference for this planet’s terrain:

I’m going to try essentially replacing this water with ice for this cold world. I think long half-pipe like river structures should work well in combination with the fast moving clouds, especially if they mostly somehow orient themselves to match the cloud direction.

River Heightfields

Ok so I spent an hour making a video and it’s not too bad. Pretty slow, and I’m rusty, and mumbly and so on, but that’s what 2x youtube speed is for ya’ll!

Here’s some screens from it, showing the node setup, the resulting heightfield, scene view and in-game. Again, this was only an hour of work, so it has a little way to go still.

MakingOfPlanet2Height01

Above: River heightmap, created using a simple noise texture, but isolating one small strip of grey value and then applying a curve that turns that grey value strip into a river bed cross section.

MakingOfPlanet2Nodes01

Here’s the very simple node network used to create the river, with the cross section I mentioned above.

MakingOfPlanet2Height02

The heightfield, represented as green for low altitude, red for high (which… is kinda backwards…) :)

MakingOfPlanet2Scene01

The heightfield with a muddy/rocky texture, and snow layered over the top to make it more obvious where the river bed is/isn’t.

MakingOfPlanet2InGame

Much more lighting and material work required to make the river stand out properly, but here’s a quick in-game screenshot anyways.

The Videoening

Wow, I’m famous, there I am, on Youtubes! Listen to me mumble! And don’t forget to 2x me!!

Cya next time!

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