Tag: development (page 2 of 3)

Rezzed Goals, PR/Marketing, Story

February 17, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

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 / Jay / Comments Off

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:

Twitter is for deleting the notion in your mind of "I wonder if anyone cares"

— Jacob Liechty (@SparseJacobian) February 4, 2017

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:

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!

Distraction Levels, Huge. More Planet Making.

February 3, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

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:

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:

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 / Jay / Comments Off

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

EXO ONE PR Marketing Planning

January 31, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

I’ll be working with a PR company/individual on EXO ONE’s PR/Marketing, probably in an hourly consulting capacity. I plan to write my own marketing plans and timeline, then get the experts to essentially OK it before I proceed. I started this process yesterday, and while I have a large number of scattered notes and documents, there is no master plan document anywhere which covers all bases, and which I’d be happy to send to anyone. So I’m continuing to work on it today so that when I’m ready to start working with someone we can hit the ground running.

Just some of the resources I’ve used to gather PR/Marketing advice includes (and I’ll leave you to Google them!):

Thomas Reisenegger’s (from ICO partners) GDC talks
GDC talks in general. I’ve watched so many they all blur into one
Game to Market eBook
Pixel Prospectors Marketing Guide
Indie Game Girl

Wot I Actually Did Today

SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats + how to mitigate and capitalise on them)
Elevator pitch tweaks
Similar games research, market sizes
Identifying similar features from similar games
Objectives (sales, timelines)
More thinking/research on game naming
Assembling some initial quotes from press
Reading developer interviews from Game to Market ebook
Product USPs and tone keywords.

Fun, no…? I enjoy reading about and learning about this stuff, but don’t exactly like actually doing it!

I probably have another day or half day of this to go before returning to the fun stuff.

Until then…!

Pre KickStarter Plans, Planet 2 Terrain, More Cloud Tweaks

January 27, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

KickStarter

Had a chat with some developer friends last night about my pre-KickStarter plans. The biggest hurdle, I feel, is getting a decent audience prior to launching the KS, so that I can get the important initial momentum.

Have also spoken with some PR/Marketing people briefly, and this is what I’m thinking:

Consult with a PR agency, perhaps focusing on audience building and planning leading up to a KS campaign. I’m told you can often do hourly consulting calls, so I’d hand them my plans + questions on audience building. I’d love to have someone on board full time for a few months, but that is bank balance breaking right now.
Do a trailer
Build an audience using magical PR advice + trailer
Get some professional feedback on my completed KickStarter page prior to launching
Launch successful KS (it’s that easy)
Use KS money for a variety of things from paying myself, to getting musicians, writers, concept artists, etc.

So I really just need to send some emails and see if some of these recommended PR people are available to work with me.

Task Planning

PR emails. I’m sure I’ll obsess over these a while :P 1 hour.
Clouds tweaking. Pretty important, 1 hr.
Planet 2. 4 hrs.
- Spend a little more time getting the clouds more “readable”. I think they just need to look a little more…clear. I’ll try and define my thoughts below
- Planet 2 geometry, replacing the placeholder generic stuff with something unique and fun.

PR/Audience Building Thoughts

The reason I’m getting in touch with some PR people is all my tweets, animated gifs, blog posts, teaser videos have amounted to only a tiny following. I need 10x my current numbers at least, pre-KS. Maybe when I share a build with press, and they start writing about it, plus I release the ‘main trailer’, I’ll suddenly gain tons of followers? Some PR consults will hopefully ease my mind a bit/confirm some of these thoughts, and give me some ideas for how to build that audience, among other things.

Actually perhaps instead of some direct emails to these PR people, I might go in a slightly round-about route of emailing some of these people’s clients, and ask what they thought first.

I’m also punching in all the listed games to check their sales on Steamspy and trying to get a feel for how well they’ve done. Hopefully, I’ll get some emails back from the developers, as it seems like a really wide range of success levels for these games.

Took 2 hours researching these people and researching/emailing their clients.

Getting Distracted

Spending too long braching off reading PR/Marketing articles. Spent maybe an hour doing this, whoops.

Planet 2 Clouds

Somehow it’s 4pm already and I’ve done pretty much nothing :/ A few more distractions today too.

Ok, clouds. They’re decent right now, but I’m going to Move Sliders TM and:

Get a bit more depth (try tweaking cloud extinction/contrast) and perhaps just cloud height
Tweak edge noise settings so it looks nicer when we are right inside clouds. Changing trueSky’s unit/scale might help here too.
One of the least realistic looking things is how the clouds don’t appear to be affected by the terrain below them at all. This might be nigh on impossible to change, but I may also be able to cheat it a bit by maybe
- increasing ‘churn’ of clouds
- lowering clouds right onto the ground and increasing their height so you can’t tell as easily
- make them more see-through(?)
Right now the clouds are possibly also too ‘constant’ and I’d like there to be more variation so there’s peroids of more and less clouds
Maybe a little more ‘distinct cloud formations’ which the player can recognise as they follow the clouds (to give more of a sense of where we are).

Progress:

Since turning lightning off I realise how broken my code is which auto-transforms us back into a glider if we are holding shift when entering clouds… Need to look at this soon-ish.

Changed the sky units, so it’s effectively scaled down but more detailed.
Can’t diffuse the clouds too much, leads to uncertainty as to whether we are actually in a cloud
Softened cloud edges (better looking close up)
Raised clouds off terrain a little so they didn’t look as odd not being affected by it
Reduced cloud density (less clouds, more open space)
Looking better in most ways, a little worse (legibility at certain angles) in others:

Might remove certain monoliths that occasionally clash compositionally. Esp now with the reduced thickness/low altitude cloud.
Going to call this good enough for now and try not to fiddle with it for many more hours.

1 hour

Quick Look at Gliding in Clouds Bug

While hardly noticeable in the last planet, it’s very annoying now, need to check this out.

Solution, EXO ONE wasn’t gaining enough energy to replace cost of gliding! 15 mins.

Removed a Couple Offensive Monoliths

And their compositionally breaking lines!

5 mins

Short Detour…

Realised I had overwritten my first planets terrain data with the new one, oops. Got it back pretty quick though, 15 mins.

More Detouring

I’m not quite sticking to plans here… Now messing with camera settings, because at night, the lens flares and stuff can look really overwhelming!! 20 mins

Planet 2 Terrain

Having some odd issues right now getting a simple 1 biome terrain working with Map Magic. Must be cos it’s late…! 30 mins.

Going to setup a screenshot for Made With Unity Friday and schedule that to go out, because it’s almost midnight. Will pick up the terrain again on Monday.

Whoring Up Some New Pluginzz!

uNature and Amplify’s screen space shadows look interesting! Might have a play :) Have a good weekend!

Fin!

Planet 2 Continued, Cloud Surfing

January 25, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

Got a little bit of tester feedback over the last couple days, mostly pretty positive, some bugs I already knew about and some I didn’t. Realised I hadn’t really tested what happens if you get stuck under monoliths, so that sounds like an issue for one tester at least. And it seems the ending sequence for the Rezzed build also didn’t work 100% of the time, whoops. The esc/start button works at least, so hopefully, whoever plays it can do that!

Planned Tasks

Go back over my own blog post(!) from yesterday and try to figure out how I can light the clouds and environment with two different coloured lights.
- The problem with using a standard Unity directional light is, that won’t light the clouds. So I have to use trueSkys sun (too bright, never see stars) or moon, which might still be too bright.
- In terms of ambient, my code currently just takes colors/intensity from trueSky, so I need to be able to tweak this now per planet. In my LevelManager (sits in a planet scene), I might have a bool you can turn on for ‘custom ambient’ which is adjusted via Unity’s Lighting.
If I can get the terrain/cloud lighting working well, then I might do some more tests with trueSky’s skybox. I might be able to try an 8192 resolution, but I’m not sure just how crazy that is for memory usage, or if there’s a way around that. Perhaps by compressing it/crunching it or maybe even using one of those texture streaming type plugins. *shrug*
Going to have a bash at doing some geometry that mimics riverbeds, so we slide around in half pipes that criss-cross each other. I have an old bit of reference that has stared at me the past year that I’ve wanted to try.

Interruptions

Had a delivery I had to deal with that took me over an hour :/ Late start again…

Lighting Clouds

So yesterday I said…

I’m trying to use trueSky’s moon to give the clouds a bit of lighting from the nebulae, but unfortunately the higher I set the moon lighting, the duller the skybox gets (due to camera exposure). Reducing the atmospheric brightness fixes this issue

Yet at some point I abandoned that for some reason. Trying again.

To get the moon lighting the clouds, moon’s albedo needs to be 1 and diameter non-zero, giving me a moon that I don’t want. I may be able to fudge a transparent moon texture in to hide it.
Then we over crank the lighting effects on the clouds to receive an unnatural amount of light (from the ‘bright nebula’)

Here’s just a test for colors from nebula hitting clouds, with a highly incorrect blue light on the terrain!

This is working, I’m able to adjust cloud color/brightness, and with that, they look more separated from the nebula as well, which is good. So I’m moving onto coding in custom ambient levels per planet.

Custom Ambient Per Planet

That was way too ez for a master coder (extreme sarcasm) like myself. Took about 5-10 mins. You can see we have some red being picked up by the terrain, the clouds are kinda half blue, half red (pinkish), which I might tweak a bit still:

Now that we have cloud color + terrain ambient + directional lighting all working, time to make the nebula look decent. I think this is a task that could potentially take days, and knowing me I’ll mess with it that long!

Nebula

Gonna mess with:

8192 resolution, see what memory usage is etc, and how much better the res is. NFI if 8192 is easy for modern PCs or I’m a total idiot for even considering it.
Will probably find some public domain NASA nebula photos I can use, then get painting/compositing I guess!
Just need to keep that blue/greenish and red color scheme.

So an 8192×4096 is ‘only’ 16mb, maybe not a bad option? That’s with DXT1 compression. However, the end result just looks *so much* like a photograph that it really kills the mood a bit.

Another issue is that I have such heavy image effects that we don’t quite get nice ‘pin prick’ looking stars, and I’m hesitant about adjusting settings (and lo’, it took 5 hrs) for one planet. I’d like the game to have a cohesive feel, and all that blur is needed to hide the non-existent art team I have :)

So I might try for something more like Homeworld did, way back in the day:

While they were super smart about how they made these (it’s all vertex colored with a somewhat complex mesh) I’ll just brute force some blurred nebula, because one man art team, and because there’s some pretty amazing nebula photos available that I can press blur on.

Found a camera bug, which I think I just also fixed… A tester reported this too so fingers crossed this didn’t happen to the Rezzed reviewer dude! 5 mins!

OK I got overly wrapped up tweaking values there for some time! Maybe because I’m fairly happy with how it’s looking. I’ve got the fuzzy nebula for now, I don’t mind it, it isn’t amazing but I’ll probably come back to it later. Probably took 2 hours. Here’s how it’s looking:

With these low and numerous clouds, I’m thinking even more that I need to raise the camera up when we enter them, so we can see more easily exactly where we are. Might be even more ‘jarring’ though if we constantly move up and down… hmmm. I might also play with trueSky’s threshold distance, which kinda lets you see through close clouds.

Cloud “Surfing”

I just made a pretty fun gameplay discovery, where you can ride clouds like waves (they’re moving really fast). I’ve angled them a bit towards the objective, and a bit sideways, so you can just look left a little to see them coming in. And it feels real nice when you’re riding along in one. Would like to do an animated gif but I need to at least fudge in an ‘advance level’ key or some way to just Build one level. Perhaps a ‘testing single scene’ bool and a string in the LevelManager for the scene to load…

The other thing that needs ‘fixing’ now is that lightning in this level is ridiculous, there’s so much easy to access cloud you’re just being hit endlessly. This is more fog than cloud, so adding this to the list.

Maybe did another hour of cloud tweaking both visually and gameplay wise.

Fudging Level Loading

Well maybe not fudge… I’m gonna use this a lot, so maybe I’ll try and do it well :P

My current GameManager code goes:

if (SceneManager.GetActiveScene().name == “ManagerScene”) //load the start screen
- {
  - Debug.Log(“ManagerScene is active, loading start screen”);
  - LoadEXOScene(“IntroEarth”);
- }
else
- {
  - SceneSetup(SceneManager.GetActiveScene());
- }

In a build, the active scene is always the ManagerScene. So I need to tell it to do otherwise, “if (BuildingForSingleScene)”.

And if we are building to just test a single scene, I wonder if I can grab the active scene name, like an Editor Script or something, rather than me having to type in the scene to build/load each time?

Alternatively, I could instead do some much simpler system where, if I whack a debug key (a number), in the intro screen, it’ll load that planet. Rather than learn editor scripting, this winz for now and doesn’t require any re-writing!

Done in about 30 mins. A few things I’d done earlier, of course, caused other scenes to break and it took me a little while to figure out what was going on!

Lightning, Off

Should be pretty easy. Eventually I might query trueSky to see if there’s a storm added in, but now I’ll just blam in a bool and set it in scene setup. Done, 5 mins. To prep for the animated gif I spent another 15 mins or so tweaking the clouds!

Din Dins O’Clock

Boom!

Animated Giffage

Hopefully can record something that looks good in kinda 15 mins, then render it out etc, might take another 30 ish mins.

That took a while as well! Probably 30-45 mins. I think this is partially a sign that the camera angle and look of the clouds needs some tweaking, as it shouldn’t be so hard to get some good footage…

You can check it out on my Twitter @JayWeston

On the second planet, early testing for 'cloud surfing/chasing' in EXO ONE. https://t.co/xxbSXHx1f1 #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames #space pic.twitter.com/Z50FSXQZGU

— JayWeston (@JayWeston) January 25, 2017

That’s it for me. Probably not even 6 hours today but feel like I got a decent amount done still.

Planet 2 Planning and Initial Tests

January 24, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

Planned Tasks:

Follow up on some emails for Hyperfocal Design + some back end “coding” 30 mins
Writing up some notes on a friends game currently in development 60 mins
Planet 2 Planning. What will the geometry look like and handle like for gameplay, what will the colors/lighting be like, etc. 2 hours
Initial Planet 2 test geometry/lighting/color. 4 hours.

Hyperfocal + Emails

Took a little longer than expected, 2 hrs total.

Planet 2

If I had the budget, team, time etc I’d probably get a bunch of concept art drawn up per-planet, but I don’t, so I’ll focus on assembling a bunch of art and photos that somewhat capture the look I’m going for.

Here’s what I’m after, considering Planet 1 is mostly ‘nice looking’, bright, warm:

General theme is still somewhat ‘nice’, welcoming, but cooler and more alien than planet 1.
No sun, night time, visible night sky with intense, nearby nebulae, which lights the terrain below in a combination of red/blue/green.
Harsher shadows, lit by EXO ONE’s light
I’d like an almost snap-frozen ocean look, but am thinking this may be quite a lofty goal. Perhaps a moon-like surface as a backup plan… Since I’m kinda lacking time and resources, I’ll be doing this a bit. Can I get good, fast results? If not, abandon and move on, maybe return later :)
As an object/flora theme I might try placing a lot of icicle/ice mushroom covered objects, which would have the added benefit of being easily repeatable.

Gameplay wise:

Similar to first planet, with variations on geometry, mostly pushing more of the voronoi patterns than flowing hills. If I can get them looking anything like waves I’ll go with that. Otherwise it’s moon surface!
Lower clouds, possibly touching the ground (will test!) therefore less height but more speed
Fast moving clouds moving in opposite direction to goal(?) Play with having to move from cloud to cloud, or avoid them. Former makes more sense considering planet 1 gameplay. One planet may require the player to stay low/behind hills… could be this one.
TBD whether we need more aerial gameplay.

Here’s the Pinterest board I made for “Planet 2”:

https://uk.pinterest.com/jayweston/exo-one-planet-2/

1hr

WIP

Initial new scene creation – cloned Sagan4 and renamed some things. I feel like this is a terrible way to do it but don’t really know any other way! I think if I ever accidentally apply prefab changes to something I shouldn’t, I can potentially stuff things up across multiple planets… Doing prefabs for every planet seems crap too, because if I want to change something for all planets, the changes aren’t made everywhere… Thoughts??
Putting some placeholder terrain in, then setting trueSky to night time.

The tough thing here might be generally making a great looking nebulae skybox… I’m going to look at how trueSky’s is done.
I’ll be replacing trueSky’s lighting with my own to simulate the light of nearby nebulae hitting the planet.
Pasted in a nebulae from my reference quickly to check out the quality level etc. It’s pretty low for a 4096… probably not worth trying to do any detail apart from large scale color variations.
- Could explore other options such as high res nebulae billboards in the sky, but for now I think I’ll go for the in-built, mostly easier method.
Just from this test it’s now super obvious I should keep the red tones lower, otherwise I quickly return to a ‘sunset looking’ color scheme similar to the first planet.
I’m trying to use trueSky’s moon to give the clouds a bit of lighting from the nebulae, but unfortunately the higher I set the moon lighting, the duller the skybox gets (due to camera exposure)
- Reducing the atmospheric brightness fixes this issue
Differentiating visually what is nebulae and what is cloud seems harder than I’d thought! But haven’t spent long yet on this. It’s just going to be tricky if I want to use a ‘low res/color wash’ style nebulae. This is made harder too when I’m wanting to use a foggy, low cloud layer. They both look quite similar. Not even worth showing!
This part of development just always seems to take me ages moving sliders. Can’t get away from it I suppose… It’s fun and I enjoy it but it takes ages figuring out good settings.
I’m now trying a more ‘iconic’ looking nebulae, rather than ‘a bunch o nebulae clouds’. So it’s obviously not terrestrial cloud… Thing is… All nebula is cloudy up close :P
Here’s the sorta detail level we get from a sharp 4096, 16bit skybox:

Not great! I’m just currently slapping in high res NASA nebula to see what looks good or not! Starting to wonder if I’m going to have to bail on the skybox idea.

Breaking for dinner. That took me about 2 hrs of playing around.

More Nebulae

Again the Nebula for some reason just seems to look like red clouds in the sky. Unsure why. Perhaps because so often when we see nebula they are very finely detailed? Or it’s the Milky Way, which is super faint to the naked eye. I could also just be pushing the color too hard…

I’ll sleep on it!

Tomorrow, Per Planet Ambient

There is no light color coming down from the red nebula, so tomorrow I might either play with some reflection probes or per-planet ambient settings, so I can add in some red/pink light (using the above screen for example). Will help give it that colorful red/blue effect I’m after.

Bye-bye!

Daily EXO ONE Dev Log. Controller Menu Support, Final Rezzed Version

January 19, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

It’s the 19th in Australia, and the deadline is the 20th in the UK, so I have kinda 1 1/2 days to go. Need the controller support 100%, so that’s number one priority!

My fall-back if I fail this will be “mouse and kb only”!

Task Planning:

Controller menu support: N hours? Never done this so no idea.
Not even going to add yesterday’s minor tasks
Testing with controller and mouse/kb 1 hour

Dear Google, “unity navigating UI controller rewired”

Found a few links, looks like the event system is what I’m dealing with:

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/883220/how-to-change-selected-button-in-eventsystem-or-de.html

Since I’m using Rewired there’s a bit I’ve found that looks like I need to setup some actions for UI:

http://guavaman.com/projects/rewired/docs/RewiredStandaloneInputModule.html

Yikes, just started and realised I also need to control drop down menus. I have a bad feeling :) AND! I still have some terrible dual Event Systems happening (one in each scene). After this I’m going to have to do some serious tidying. I barely know what an event system is so yeah… bad feeling!

Rewired Event Systemz

Looks like I need to:

Setup Rewired Input Manager and Event System
Add new controller actions for UI and maybe a new controller map/category

Ok so I’ve set it all up and I’m pushing controller sticks and d-pads but nothing happening. Kinda dunno if we can even control UIs in another scene or not… I have Rewired in the Manager Scene and the UI to control in the IntroScene. Reading more!

Seems if I click a button then move the controller stick I can use it, think I just need to set a menu option as active to start with, which is annoying as it’s in a different scene!

Moved some stuff into the Manager scene so it’s easier to reference, now we start with the NEW GAME button selected, and can select menu options but not Action any buttons. 1 hr so far.

Action button working (typo!) as well as drop-down menus, amazingly. Refactoring a bunch of stuff now that scripts and objects were moved around. Getting there! 30 mins

While testing this, I realised that if the game will be in a noisy hall and/or someone isn’t wearing headphones or doesn’t wanna listen to the story, they’ll think the long intro is a bug, or boring or whatever. Anyway, adding a button to skip the intro narration! Functionality already exists for debugging so… 5 mins.

Ack! Gross code! Again I need PlayerControls in my manager scene, but really can’t right now, no time! Maybe I can whack something into the Event System to handle this for now, nfi!

Trying to just ‘whack in’ PlayerControls in the intro scene but bad things are happening. Functionality already exists 5 mins ehhhh? Whoops again! 30 mins later and I’ve mostly got this working using some if(introStarted) and if(gameLevelStarted) in PlayerControls. All works, except if I hit New Game, and the intro starts, with the mouse it’s fine, but the controller seems to ‘double click’ or something, causing us to insta skip the intro. Can’t see anything in Rewired to cause a button press to be down longer or anything, might fudge a delay into introStarted for now. Done, 5 mins.

Ok, main menu just needs the drop down items to be red when selected and we are done. Boom!

Rewired for In-Game Menu

I think the main thing for this will just be that I have to tell the EventSystem to select Resume every time I hit Esc/Start, so we can cycle through menu options. I’ll cross my fingers anyway. Here’s what Rewired says to do:

void SetSelected(GameObject selectableObject)

{

// Set the currently selected GameObject

EventSystem.current.SetSelectedGameObject(selectableObject);

}

I think I can just grab

EventSystem.current.SetSelectedGameObject(selectableObject);
and force it to always be Resume? This isn’t a complex menu or anything…

As usual, and probably because my code is a terrible mess, to cut a long story short, there’s lots of broken things happening. The starting menu appears in the tutorial/planet scenes, somehow the ingame menu is appearing in the Intro screen on restart and more! It’s 130 so taking a lunch break.

Lunch

2pm restart. Wondering if I should be trying harder to write good code right now instead of panic rushing stuff. Have a feeling I’ll be working a couple of late nights…

40 minutes in and things are a little cleaner, but still these problems:

Restarting doesn’t turn the Quality/Res/NewGame Canvas back on
- If I manually turn it on and try and press New Game there’s a bunch of null refs from unrelated stuff.
~~When we restart, we can hit escape and the in-game menu appears…~~ 10 mins

Slowly moving everything into sane places in my code, mostly in SceneSetup and LoadEXOScene places instead of just blammed in dumb places with similar function names in an attempt to confuse myself as much as possible.

CofffeeeeeeEeEeeeee! 10 mins

Ok things are looking good! The restart() loop is working fine now except the narration isn’t restarting properly.

My First OnDisable() Ever

I swear, first time I’ve ever done one… to try and handle resetting vars for Restart(). #unitytips4pros

Seriously the fact I’ve never used this is so ridic!

Shortly followed by me writing this comment to myself in my code: //we never disable this script YOUUUUUU!!!

My Dumbest OnDisable() Ever

void LoadTutorialLevel()
{
OnDisable(); //weeeeeeeee!
GameManager.instance.LoadEXOScene(“LoopFacility”);
}

Yeah, I’ll rename this, lol, maybe “ResetVars()”. I’m just being stupid. 45 mins later we can restart and still hear my amazing, self-voiced Aussie-accented narration!

Now the question is, can I restart from ANYWHERE. Testing!

Testing!

An asteroid annoyingly blocks the monoliths blue beam, it’s distracting! Fixed 2 mins
Restart works like a treat except once we’ve completed the game/demo, the narrator (and all sound) isn’t restarting.

Watch me Learn!

After we fire the player off at the end of the demo, I mute everything, so…

void OnDisable()
{
MasterAudio.UnmuteEverything();
}

Boom! Task complete dare I say? Now building and testing with mouse/kb and controller.

Test Build Notes

4pm

In the build, the dropdowns for Quality and Res are switched around, and resolution was 1180 or something… uh oh! Fixed in 30 mins
Ok now it looks fine but I can’t use the interface at all… Can’t change drop downs without them ‘staying’ and obscuring other interface, and New Game doesn’t work at all either. Fixed in 30 mins
Even while debug says I’m changing quality settings, the game is definitely just using some middling quality setting. Who knows when the last time was that worked… Anyway fixed in-editor, Fixed 15 mins
Getting hit by lightning in tutorial, lawl… This fixed itself??
In the build, we can see menu options but instead of the intro/earth scene in the background it’s pure black. But in editor it’s fine……….!!!!!!!! NFI why the differences. OK maybe being hasty, it’s because in editor I have both scenes open already, so testing with just Manager scene loading first… Fixed 30ish mins.
Narration pauses too long in intro, players might skip in 2 seconds Fixed 2 mins
If I leave the intro to complete, I get a bunch of rewired errors – check to see the difference between skipping intro (which I’ve been doing endlessly) and letting it run
- Odd, further testing didn’t replicate the bug… Fixed

Second Round of Testing Notes

Just played through with the controller, striking out stuff that’s too hard basket/not critical:

~~Low player/environ vol in tutorial~~
~~Voice intro dull sounding? Muted? “Wrong” mixer settings?~~
~~Mouse pointer stays till we use controller~~
~~Fully open tutorial door, we can hit it accidentally~~
Narrator vol is messed up if we go in clouds. Only adjust mixer if narration not happening. Fixed 5 mins
Controller > start. Resume. In game menu stays open. Fixed 10 mins
Controller > restart, lost focus on Intro Menu. Need another one of these EventSystem.current.SetSelectedGameObject(selectableObject); Fixed
After restart, skip intro, no player or environment volume in tutorial scene
Can’t see some lightning bolts hitting us, usually the first one??

Dinner O’Clock

Breaking for dinner at 630, then probably do another hour or two since I’m running out of time. Also just re-read the closing date for LeftField, seems the 20th is closed, dunno if I can submit on the day or not so…

Committed. 815pm

Now to add the EventSystem.SetSelectedObject to the main menu/new game button in case of a restart… I can’t seem to figure out why I can’t get the New Game button to start selected/highlighted on Restarts, which is unfortunate… It may be something to do with the mouse taking focus away from it, like if I ever move the mouse… However I just tried not touching anything, and that made no difference. The Rewired Event System confirms that it is actually selected/highlighted, and I can just press Action to start a New Game, so it may not be highlighting correctly or using the wrong color for some reason. Might Google this.

Found this: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1159573/eventsystemsetselectedgameobject-doesnt-highlight.html
The WaitForEndOfFrame coroutine was a winner. 15 mins.
My other worry is if someone knocks the mouse and takes focus away from the menu… I may need to have something that detects mouse or joystick usage and uses that.

For the joystick, perhaps “if selected object in the event system is null, and if any joystick axis/button down, set new game as the selected object”. Mouse doesn’t need that come to think of it.

Re-activating Menus with Controller if Focus Lost

Was pretty happy with this code, which appears to have worked first go, can now move the mouse off menus/click off menus so they deactivate, then move the d-pad and the menu will come back. Only downside is, controller axis doesn’t do that yet. Gonna try for 5 mins. Wow, things work! Here’s my amazing code, which is mostly other peoples amazing code and plugins!

930PM, going to do another Build Test.

Third Build Test Notes

Can’t select resolution with controller.
At end of demo, the mouse pointer was sat on a button, and no Controller input would budge it… Maybe “if Controller input, lock mouse cursor”? Then, if mouse movement, unlock? Same happened just in the normal in game menu but multiple buttons would get selected. I’m sure there’s a better way of doing this but for now… HACK ITTTT.

Trying to fix the lock state stuff by detecting mouse or joystick inputs, annnd it also worked pretty well:
Hmm, I think I need a wider blog theme so code it more legible!

Lightning, First Strike Sucks

And is invisible. Pretty important player’s realise quickly they can get struck so fixing… 10:15pm

First I will build, zip, upload, since this could be used now I think (still needs more testing though).

I fired off a bolt in secret at the start of the level, lol. Worked! 30 mins.

Still kinda hard to see the sphere covered in lightning too, gonna tweak that some more as well. The way this plugin works, it’s almost hard to have the settings ‘middle ground’ instead of it looking like it’s off or ONFIRELIGHTNING-APOCALYPSE.

Last Thing(?), Sound Levels

Some weird sound stuff happening, I dunno if I reset anything properly from scene to scene. I think I need to look at MasterAudios Dynamic Sound Group stuff to see if we are adding new sound groups endlessly or something…

Uh, lightning going off in tutorial again somehow? I did that hacky lightning so it’d go off only on the first planet… also for some reason I can hear wind now… This problem seems intermittent! Leaving it…

The reason we can hear rain in the intro after a restart is, we enter a cloud, hear rain, then restart, and rain isn’t turned off. I OnDisabled() the shiiiit out of it!

Again, the lightning + inclouds sounds appearing randomly in the tutorial is really bad. Gotta investigate at least 15 mins.

11PM

Added some extra things (sceneIsExterior) to try and shield lightning from going off in the tutorial… MasterAudio must also be firing InClouds to get the sound I hear as well, but nfi how it’s fired. There’s no clouds in the tutorial level! HumMmmMmmm

Oh, and the drop down for resolution…

If I can’t get this, no big deal, who has a monitor that isn’t 1920p?! Well the odds someone does for Rezzed just for my game is 0!

Abandoned! Can’t make sense of the code I copy pasted ages ago!

Final Test

Seems to work, ran 2 full games with mouse/kb and 2 with controller, no problems.

Did one more and still feel like sometimes the sphere doesn’t transform into a glider when entering a cloud with 0 charge with glide button held…! Noticed that it costs more to glide than we can recharge, which might have been the reason? But it only seemed a problem on first cloud enter… Tested a little more, still unsure, good enough though – you often get hit by lightning in clouds anyway I guess(!).

Tidying start position so we definitely roll down the hill the right way… And there’s a bit of geometry you can snag on the tutorial.

Zipping and submitting now and calling it a night once that’s done. Now past midnight!

Phewwwf. Maybe I’ll submit then get up at 9-10, do some more tests just to make sure, and I can submit another updated one if I need to.

Daily Dev Log. Social Media Optimizing, Debugging Jumping

January 17, 2017 / Jay / 1 Comment

17 Jan 2017

Planned Task List

Answer a couple of Hyperfocal (my bread ‘n butter biz) emails. ~30 mins
Do a little Facebook ad research ~15 mins
Write an intro email to an Aussie games journalist ~10 mins
Build EXO ONE and check it actually works (was testing in-editor) ~10 mins
Take deep breath and try to fix the jumping problem for the 10th time. Jumping was never an issue until I rewrote some code to make things clearer/better. Surprise I made it a little worse at the same time! This could take all day, but I might admit defeat at the 2-3 hour mark (because Rezzed Left Field games event deadline) and move on to other tasks like yesterdays:
When reaching the end transport monolith, some tidying up needed for sounds etc.
Add escape/Start menu so players can restart the game
Numerous small things like HUD appearing when it shouldn’t, old text that makes no sense in intro, etc.

Realtime Notes:

Stuff that comes up as I go:

Facebook Ads Research

My Facebook ads research: https://www.quicksprout.com/2017/01/16/15-advanced-facebook-advertising-techniques-that-you-probably-didnt-know-about/

Social Media Post Timing
I always thought posting social media at 9am was the optimum time. Just saw this, though, which is kinda arguing against that. This is for facebook, but possibly applies to other social media:

Pages to Watch
See how often other developers post on Facebook and their level of engagement using “Pages to Watch”. Pages > Insights > scroll down. Requires 100 followers. Ugh, I have 70 something. Going to just buy 30 so I can mess with this.

Video is huge on Facebook
I’ve definitely noticed this last year, and need to start uploading videos there instead of just posting links to Youtube.

I thought those 3 were the best points, but check out the article yourself.

Email

Contacted a local journalist (something I do way too infrequently) to see if he was keen to check out the game. I always ‘feel the fear’ of contacting people, mostly because it involves putting yourself and your game out there to be potentially ignored. But that is life or something! In the email was the ‘elevator pitch’:

“EXO ONE is an exo-planetary exploration game where you float, fly, roll and glide with complete freedom across a multitude of surreal, alien worlds.”

Thoughts?

Testing Build

Building and checking that it works first of all… Here’s some notes I took:

Quotes ” ” in tutorial are all over the place, just gonna remove
Debug warning text shouldn’t be showing in tutorial, but is. Prob related to recent addition of Energy Explanation stuff
Wormhole fx don’t show in tutorial
Jump bug almost seems to be happening more than usual :/
No wind buffeting sound in clouds, probably due to tweaking sound levels yesterday.

The sound and music levels are a little off still, but I sense a huge time-sink ahead if I start moving sliders. Slider moving is truly my bane. Maybe if I have time I’ll return to this. Now, jump buuuug!

Took 20 mins.

Jump Bug

Kicking this off at 1130am with some Hyper Light Drifter music by DisasterPeace :)

Playing in-editor to watch when jump count debugs fire off, to try and get an idea what causes one jump to work and not another. It feels like an issue with FixedUpdate, but the way I handle the jump controls, it should only fire for one frame. Removed a line of hacky looking code and tested again, seems to be working. But I’ve thought I’d fixed it before! Will carry on testing it as I do other things. Took 10 mins.

Related to jumping, the visual effect for jumping in glide mode is broken, so working on that now.

Glider to Jump Transformation

Only I could make something as simple as a ball transforming into a flattened ball so hard! Really keen to get a programmer’s eyes on this to get their opinion on my logic/methodology. A friend of mine has offered, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what he thinks.

I think my logic skills are just so bad that I have trouble visualising how to handle all the cases of ball transformation, from sphere to glider, to jumping sphere, jumping glider and back… Typically when I’m stuck like this I just kinda start trying thingz and seeing what the result is. Probably hence how slow I am!

I just adjusted script execution order to hopefully clean up conflicting timings… I think this is probably a bad solution, but surprisingly that fixed it! The reason I tried this, was that in my code ‘tidy up’ prior to holidays, I split the player code out into 3 scripts, and now a few things happen “at the same time(?)” in Update(), whoops. In the future, if doing this, I probably need to do less bools and more calling of functions in the separate scripts, instead of in Update(), using bools to trigger when stuff happens. If that makes any sense…?

30 mins

End of Planet/Level Tidying

Mostly I need to just properly end the ‘demo’ if it’s shown at Rezzed. When you reach the transport monolith and fire into the sky, some sounds go stupid and I need to stop that. I’ll also bring up text with ‘demo over’ and then a menu with Restart Game and Restart Level. Come to think of it, since I should add this for testers and for the Rezzed build in general, in case something breaks, maybe I should make a ‘proper’ little menu screen with these two options that’s available at any time using Start/Esc. Unsure how long this might take, should just need to call my level changing code and make the menu/options/on/off etc… I’m going to wildly guess 1 hour. 12:17pm

So far so good, have a menu in my ManagerScene I can turn on and off with Esc/Start button, displaying the two buttons, but can’t seem to make a click happen. Hopefully there isn’t some dumb code blocking rays somehow…

Ah, nice, found this: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/cant-click-ui-buttons.431042/ which explained how to use the EventSystem to check what rays are hitting. Nailed this in 2 seconds and restart level is working with a couple nul refs, which don’t seem to be hurting anything too much…!

Kinda happy with how my LoadEXOScene(string levelname) works, as I was able to easily reuse it for the menu level loading/reloading. Added something so Esc can’t be hit in the start menu (level can’t be restart from the start of the game!), and testing now in a build.

A few things,

No mouse appearing on esc/menu in build, due to 3rd person camera plugin hiding it
There’s an errant escape Input somewhere that’s still quitting when I hit esc/start.
Narration continues while paused (leave this for now, doesn’t matter)
Need an Exit button for testers/in case the game bugs out and people wanna completely close and restart the game.
Need an Exit menu item on start screen + actual game exit code
Realised I need a better RestartLevel() because there’s 2 levels (I was cheating and just loading the first planet).

Time: 1:25pm, looks like I might need another half an hour, so might take twice as long as my hail mary guess.

Having a break, now that I’ve completed a few of the above. 1:50

Break O’Clock

Back at 230 with sweet caffeination after dropping in at William Chyr’s Manifold Garden stream.

Finalising Menus/Exiting

Just realised since my Start Screen scene is separate from my Manager Scene, I can’t just drop in my GameManager script to OnClick to Quit, which is annoying. I guess I should maybe move all of this into the Manager scene, but not right now! Added some duplicate Application.Quit code :P

Things taking slightly longer here as I’m trying to test Editor/Build specific stuff like Quit and mouse pointer lockstates, which for some reason seems different in editor vs build.

I’m getting very tempted to move PlayerControls into the Manager Scene, as I now need to ‘re-write’ some more stuff to handle hitting escape when the player isn’t in a scene, ugh. Will need refactoring though… Must… not… do…! OK, no quitting allowed during the intro for now! Boom!

This is turning into an even larger task, lots of stuff I didn’t realise I’d need. Here’s the remaining tasks for restart/reset:

After restart level and restart game,
Menu remains
Game stays paused
Other UI remains.
Need to probably eventually make a state for this?
For some reason mouse pointer doesn’t appear when hitting esc in tutorial scene but does in first planet.
While testing in tutorial, noticed some more broken text/prompt stuff, eep!

3pm now. Might take another hour for this, if I was to double what I actually think it’ll take!

Added Resume() which is called after level restart, and a resume button, so those things now work. On to Restart now.

Wrote a new Restart() function similar to my LoadEXOScene() one. Task now blown out to most of the day :/ 4PM

Getting close now, fixed all the above and Restart() is working with only one problem, music continues after restart.

Boom, done!

Check out this amazing menu (lol):

Certainly good enough to go, IMO!

Lightning

I was having issues with getting lightning visually depicting how much charge a player had, which led me to email the plugin developer for this procedural lightning. I’ve got a response so I’m going to try his tweaks to see what they’re like, so I can respond before end-of-day. I kinda try and prioritize stuff like this when most developers are in a different time zone, I don’t wanna wait too long between emails. Committing first, though! 430PM

Broke to make food… Now 530. About an hour then I’m done.

Updated lightning plugin as the author’s changes didn’t work, suspect this is the reason. Still getting errors, so emailed the author back and moving on.

Other Tasks

In order of importance that I can complete in 45 mins or so:

Tidying sound etc for level ending
Wormhole FX in tutorial isn’t turning on
Wind buffeting sound in clouds is gone for some reason
Player starting position is crap, we start rolling backward toward the camera. Starting on a hill would be best.

For now I’m just muting sound when you touch the monolith and fading to black, completed in 5-10 mins. Buttons don’t look great on black though… And the pointer is invisible… Fixed, 5 more mins…

Ugh, now for some reason my Restart code isn’t working! Perhaps because it’s about 40C in my office right now! Ok phew, it was just because I changed the file/folder names for some scene files…! My rage levels have risen the temp even farther now and it’s dinner time.

DEV COMPLETE. 6PM.

This is working out fairly well. Either I’m getting more done, or am more focused or I just remember now what I’ve done, either way quite liking this! I wonder how boring and incomprehensible it is to read, though? :)