I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog for the past month, and I’d like to apologize for that. I have a tendency to get caught up in my game’s development and forget about pretty much everything else. This whole player interaction piece has always been hard for me, and I guess I just let it slip for a while. No matter, you’re not here to listen to excuses, let’s get on to the good stuff.
No Seriously, We Do
It’s tilted the wrong way because try as I might I could not get it to balance on the curve.
My wife has recently been getting into 3D printing, and this was one of the first things she printed. It hasn’t been sanded/finished yet in this picture, but it’s pretty damn cool as-is. While my wife did this all of her own accord, it has spurred in me a desire to make some merchandise available for both the company and the game as it moves closer to finish. I’m going to try really hard on the marketing angle of this game once I get the first vertical slice ready, and shirts and other physical objects seem like a good way to aid that. I do eventually want to go to conventions to present, and this has got me thinking about aspects of that I hadn’t even considered before. Plus, 3D printing is just cool.
The Slice
One of the things I want to do differently this time around is the way I approach the the promotion of the game. In Vivo was made in a very linear fashion, and I didn’t have a demo ready until just a few weeks before release. This, combined with the fact that I was so set on releasing it that I didn’t really give adequate time to content creation, meant there was very little time for marketing, and by the time I was able to I was so focused on finishing that I dropped the ball on it completely. The fact that it sold any copies at all given my efforts at marketing it still amazes to this day. That being said, this time I’m trying to get a polished demo out as soon as possible. We call this the vertical slice.
Essentially this is a cross section of the whole game, a short amount of gameplay with the most important systems in place and all of the polish of the finished game. I’m still quite a ways off from that goal, but I feel like I’ve overcome the final hurdle in regards to things I’ve never done before. I’ve made procedural level systems, I’ve done stealth and platforming and AI, and I’ve done sound effects and music. Now that I have the lighting and animation systems finished, all that’s left is making assets, and doing things that I’ve done before in code. That’s not to say it will be easy or fast, but at least I can better predict how long it will take and what obstacles I’m likely to encounter.
Lights and Spirits
Since the last update I’ve been focused on integrating the Sprite Lamp shader that I wrote with the existing Spine animation system I had been using. This presented some unexpected and maddening challenges. While I’m not 100% satisfied with how it is right now, it’s good enough to move forward for now. The crux of the Spine integration problems was due to the way Unity handles lights for objects on the same layer. It seems to be that Unity processes all objects on the same layer in one batch, first rendering the ambient and directional lights, and then adding each dynamic light one at a time to that initial render pass. Since the lights don’t know or care which object was drawn first and therefore occluded by other parts, it blends on the lights for everything to the top of the first render. Things that were covered up before (like the arm behind the body) have their light values blended onto the image anyway. It creates a really bizarre ghostly image.
While this may be a cool effect for some of the more bizarre Lovecraftian horrors, it seems like a bad fit for any protagonist who isn’t Ghost Dad.
The good news is that after spending almost two weeks trying to fix this issue, I have something that works. It’s not ideal, and creates some odd graphical artifacts that I haven’t exactly figured out how to remove, but it works. The strategy here was to explode the Spine model on the z axis by a very small fragment so that each piece was on a different plane. This is irrelevant for rendering position, since the orthographic camera used for 2D ignores the z axis, but it lets me implement z-axis sorting for determining which pixels to write. Thankfully it looks like the guys over at Esoteric Software had planned on adding this as a feature at some point, and changing the runtime to make this work is literally a one-line change. Using this, I can test for the z values at each pixel to determine which object gets drawn and only draw that object. The problem is that I can only pick one object, and it’s all or nothing. This means I lose the translucent anti-aliasing effect on the edges of each object, since they can’t blend down to the next lower object because it isn’t even processed.
The hard edges are like knives in my eyes. On the plus side I get rim lighting for free. I have no idea where that effect came from, I sure didn’t do it.
It’s functional, and I definitely prefer it over the bizarre apparition it was producing before, but I would love to lose those hard edges and weird unlit pixels on the fringes. I think I can fix some of them, and with how dark the game will be, the hard edges shouldn’t be too noticeable, but settling for less than ideal always stings. This works for now, and it may be what the game ships with barring a few bug fixes and optimizations. Either way, it’s off the plate for the vertical slice and I can finally move on to other things that aren’t lighting.
Sneaking, Walking, Running
The next step in creating something that looks presentable is creating a character that moves naturally. While I was working on the lighting system, I was continually tweaking the walking animation. It’s in a place now that I’m pretty happy with, but there’s a lot more to this game than just walking. I have laid out a list of animations that I need to create to handle all of the gameplay systems that will be in the slice, and though there’s quite a few, creating and tweaking the animations is incredibly easy with Spine. Here are the walking and running animations that I have so far, and over the next week I hope to add jumping, sneaking and maybe some of the ledge animations.
I should be back next week with more updates, and hopefully a real name for this game. I’ve got something picked out, but I have some paperwork to do before I can announce it. For now, though, I have to fix the tear in those pants.
