next »

[friken]

This week is off to a great start.

Our Intro story sequence art is making progress:


And our next alien race moves from concept sketch to ready for animation:

[friken]

Our artist has been chugging along turning our alien concept sketches into game-asset-reality.

Meet the Cylmis:


And the Dravlac:

[friken]

BlpBlp:


Harkallenia:


PogFrot:

[friken]

It has been a while since I've posted any progress. Progress has been slow, but fruitful. Our in-game UI is starting to take shape. We have made a number of revisions before sharing it here, and I wanted to say THANKS to the gaf guys in the indieGAF irc channel! Tons of great feedback there that has helped refine things.

Combat UI:


Alien Dialogue UI:
[URL=http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/28/27385/Harkalinia.1.jpg]

[friken]

nice to see it come together ingame w animation:

[Thomas Finch]

That reminds me of the original Starcraft mission briefings.

[migrafael]

My son has finished the first couple songs for the game. I'm too close to the project and biased so feedback please 

Hyperspace
Combat

They sound pretty good!

Put some of this final art on the front page. I was almost dismissing the game based on those earlier efforts. (I now it's superficial but there's so much to see in the internets...)

[jamesprimate]

wah this is looking gorgeous! between the in-game gaga solar flare style and the weirdness of the aliens, im really looking forward to this 

[friken]

wah this is looking gorgeous! between the in-game gaga solar flare style and the weirdness of the aliens, im really looking forward to this 

Great feedback thanks. I've been so heads down trying to make the game sometimes I need the obvious pointed out Yeah, the project has come a long way since the images on the first page and I didn't think of how many people would look at page 1 first and write it off.

[friken]

Playing with new algorithmic textures for gas planets:



video... the gif is pretty grainy:

[friken]

As a point of comparison, here is how we were doing gas giants before finding new algorithmic substances from the last post:

[karlozalb]

wow, the effect is amazing

[Citsua]

There's too much awesomeness for me in this thread

[friken]

There's too much awesomeness for me in this thread

love the kind words

Our newest alien race. Veelow:

[EverydayDreamer]

This looks beautiful! Really love the presentation so far Also awesome to be able to work on something as a family like that, sounds like a very unique experience. Keep up the great work

[JobLeonard]

Not that you should worry too much about realism, but taking Jupiter as an average sized gas giant with its radius of ~440000 km, estimating that the faster clouds I see in your video take ~10 seconds to go from front to side, so circle around the planet in around 40 seconds, I estimate that they are traveling at roughly 11000 km / s, or over 30000 times the speed of sound at Earth pressure, or 1/30th of the speed of light.

That's some fast gas.

Now, about that moon I see...

[friken]

Not that you should worry too much about realism, but taking Jupiter as an average sized gas giant with its radius of ~440000 km, estimating that the faster clouds I see in your video take ~10 seconds to go from front to side, so circle around the planet in around 40 seconds, I estimate that they are traveling at roughly 11000 km / s, or over 30000 times the speed of sound at Earth pressure, or 1/30th of the speed of light.

That's some fast gas.

Now, about that moon I see...

heh..... definitely not real-time. It is an advanced planet-sim mark 4 monitoring system from futurecorp that shows planet rotation sped up so you can say wow without staring for an hour

[friken]

I'm playing with the camera system during dialogue sequences. Having the camera pan/zoom adds a nice depth of scene feel. I'll have to capture a video soon, but a couple closeups after the camera pans in for alien dialogue response:

PogFrot:


Moknon:


I'm playing with how close I can zoom before too much of the 'painted' art feel is not detailed enough and loses it's impact.

[friken]

[friken]

So, today I asked our new artist to help make some ship concepts as we are struggling with modeling cool ships. To date our game has always used a mix of 2d/3d, but 3d for ships/planets/surfaces and 2d for fx, aliens, ui, etc.

In about an hour he color sketched the following for the lipoc race:


Looked pretty good and made me rethink using 3d ships. If we could make 2d look good enough, it really would save a ton of modeling time, so I asked him to make a ship overhead view for the Veelow race. About an hour later I had this:


hmmm... cool concept, so I put it in the game as a 2d sprite. As I feared I couldn't get any form of lighting on a 2d quad to look anything but terrible. The lighting for the 3d models was great... can't backtrack to have virtually no lighting for 2d sprites, and for SURE don't want to go back to the stone ages of making a ton of sprites w manually painted lighting at various angles.

I remembered an awesome kickstart a while back for lamplight. For those unfamiliar, this is REALLY worth a look:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/finnmorgan/sprite-lamp-dynamic-lighting-for-2d-art

So I looked into doing something similar in Unity. The Unity community being huge and awesome, low and behold someone already beat me to it (Huge kudos to Kencho):
http://kencho-dev-blog.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/cel-shaded-sprites-in-unity3d-43-and.html

So I started implementing a custom shader based on Kencho's work. I struggled a bit at first but I'm thrilled with the end result... 2d realtime lighting that really looks great/3dish. Note the image below is 3 screenshots merged w the same ship at multiple angles so you can see 1:1 pixel of the lighting:


The basics is a custom shader to use a normal map, which is generated from a horiz lighting and vert lighting. Here are my two lighting images:



And of course I need a gif to really show the effect:


I still need to balance out the left/top lighting images and tweak the base image to not have lighting from the front baked in, but I'm pretty happy with the results.