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[William Chyr]

Ooh, nice!  Will be a great attract screen when you show the game again

Yeah! It has taken me way too long to get around to making this.

I'm excited to start getting back on the festival/convention circuit. I've taken the last four months off (other than GDC) to focus on restructuring the code and inner workings of the game, and I'm excited to start showing some of the new stuff I've been working on soon.

[Connor]

i really like the fade effect one, feels fairly professional

[William Chyr]

i really like the fade effect one, feels fairly professional

You saying I'm not professional!!!???

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #203 - 04/24/2015

Getting back into working on beams that change the color of cubes. Interestingly enough, this is the mechanic I was working on back when I first started this devlog. It was what I talked about during the very first update.



You can change the color of a cube multiple times. Notice that the inside of the cube maintains its original color.

Also working on these large tetramino (I think?) blocks:





They're pretty hideous a the moment, but sufficient for communicating what I need them to.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #204 - 04/26/2015

Worked on a bunch of new puzzles involving beams that change the colors of the cubes.

Having spent the past 6 months or so tweaking details of existing puzzles, I had forgotten how hard it is to design a puzzle from scratch. Puzzle design definitely uses a very different muscle than level design. I'm feeling a bit rusty in that department.

These were based on a few rough drafts that I had built about a year and half ago, with some very basic ideas. There was some stuff to go from, but for the most part, it had been so long, and many of those were so poorly designed, that it was pretty much starting all over again.

Anyway, got 5 built! I'm excited to start testing these next week.

[bsp]

congrats on the announcement dude. still looking great

[William Chyr]

congrats on the announcement dude. still looking great

Thanks so much! Got some new stuff in the works that's going to make a really big difference.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #205 - 04/28/2015

Spent all of last night trying to write a transparent gradient shader, and learned a lot about Unity 5's Standard Surface Shader model in the process.

I wanted a tree that grew double gravity cubes.

This was my first go:



As you can see, it is absolutely hideous.

I thought a better style would be to have a gradient going from blue to red from bottom to top through the leaves.

I had a really hard time though trying to write a surface shader that did this.

You see, if I added the tag

Code:

"RenderType" = "Transparent"

or

Code:

"Queue" = "Transparent"

which seems to be what you're supposed to do if you want something transparent rendered, I get this:



Notice that there are no outlines in the red leaves (that's the shader I'm writing).

However, in the blue leaves, which uses the "Transparent" rendering mode of the Unity 5 standard surface shader, there are outlines.

If I use "RenderType" = "Opaque", I get this irregardless of what alpha value I set the output color to:



I was getting super confused and frustrated, because no matter what combination of RenderType or Queue tags with "Transparent" and "AlphaTest", the leaves were being rendered after all the edges were drawn.

As it turns out, in the Shaders 5.0 upgrade guide:

By default all opaque surface shaders output 1.0 (“white”) into alpha channel now. If you want to stop that, use “keepalpha” option on the #pragma surface line.

I needed to add keelalpha on the #pragma surface line.

I also found I needed this line for the shader to work:

Code:

Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha

I don't fully understand why, but if I comment out the line the shader doesn't work.

Eventually, I was able to get it to work, but instead of gradient, I just saw black:



I switched to setting the gradient on screenspace, and that seemed to be working:



And then it hit me - I was using world space position, and all my objects were located in y < 0 ! That's why everything was black.

I zoomed out, and lo and behold:



The point at which black changed to red is y = 0.

I just moved everything up to y = 0, and it was working:



This was around 3 AM, so I wasn't really thinking straight, hence such a silly mistake.

Anyway, today I will add some code so that it can use the local position to set the gradient instead of relying on world space y = 0.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #206 - 04/29/2015

Added some code so that the gradient can now be offset from world space origin, and also any axis (including diagonal) can be used to form the gradient.

The coolest part is that it's all done using a dot product in the shader instead of conditionals.

Initially, I did the diagonal gradient just because I could, but then it turned out to make a lot more sense, and also looks way cool, so I think that's the one I am going to go with.

Here are some screenshots:













Man... all these different mechanics are finally starting to come together. It's really exciting, but also super overwhelming. Looking forward to playtesting new puzzles soon.

Also, because I've just been trying to get these mechanics working, all the code I've written these last 2 days have been a total mess. Magic numbers everywhere!

[Ninety]

Those trees are sexy as hell.

[TopherPirkl]

This is a damn beautiful game-- I'm really looking forward to it! I think I briefly saw it at GDC this year.

I didn't read the whole devlog word for word, but I did page through it, so I apologize if you discussed this somewhere in the 30+ pages (wow!): what's the current audio direction for the game? I envision it as being kind of a free-form experience, so I imagine you have music that will kind of reflect that and give you some breathing room, as a player. Who's working on the audio side? Are they local? I'm curious, because I know a handful of the Chicago-area game audio people.

[William Chyr]

Those trees are sexy as hell.

 

This is a damn beautiful game-- I'm really looking forward to it! I think I briefly saw it at GDC this year.

I didn't read the whole devlog word for word, but I did page through it, so I apologize if you discussed this somewhere in the 30+ pages (wow!): what's the current audio direction for the game? I envision it as being kind of a free-form experience, so I imagine you have music that will kind of reflect that and give you some breathing room, as a player. Who's working on the audio side? Are they local? I'm curious, because I know a handful of the Chicago-area game audio people.

Thanks so much!

I haven't talked to much about audio so far. I do have plans but I'm keeping them a secret for now.

[TopherPirkl]

Those trees are sexy as hell.

 

This is a damn beautiful game-- I'm really looking forward to it! I think I briefly saw it at GDC this year.

I didn't read the whole devlog word for word, but I did page through it, so I apologize if you discussed this somewhere in the 30+ pages (wow!): what's the current audio direction for the game? I envision it as being kind of a free-form experience, so I imagine you have music that will kind of reflect that and give you some breathing room, as a player. Who's working on the audio side? Are they local? I'm curious, because I know a handful of the Chicago-area game audio people.

Thanks so much!

I haven't talked to much about audio so far. I do have plans but I'm keeping them a secret for now.

Ooh, very mysterious. I'm excited to hear your plans!

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #207 - 05/02/2015

Can't believe it's May already! Been working on new puzzles and doing some level design. Every mechanic adds a set of constraints to the level design process that makes it exponentially more difficult, so there's a lot to consider at once.

Started working on some architectural elements.

Below are some screenshots documenting the evolution of an area in World 002.

Here's the first go at trying out some different pillar style:



Having small details really help provide contrast to the scale of the level.

Starting to fill out the area with these pillars:



A view from outside:



Once I got the windows in and the lighting fixed, the shadows make a huge difference!

[CaLooch]

specifically devlog 205 a few days ago was a great write up.  really interesting seeing that process as that developed, playing around with the shaders.  The end result looks great fwiw

[marcgfx]

the new windows/shadows look really awesome! its subtle enough to not distract from the game, but makes it a lot more interesting. love it!

[William Chyr]

specifically devlog 205 a few days ago was a great write up.  really interesting seeing that process as that developed, playing around with the shaders.  The end result looks great fwiw

Thanks! Those posts are usually the result of a long night of struggling with code and banging my head against the wall. I write them mainly for myself, as it's likely later I will have forgotten what I did when I come across a similar problem, but I think also a lot of other people find them helpful as well.

It's also really cool to see how the entire process evolves. Too often, we only see the finished product and think that just popped out of the developer's head like that, when in reality, it went through a very similar process with the leaves.

the new windows/shadows look really awesome! its subtle enough to not distract from the game, but makes it a lot more interesting. love it!

Thanks! I need to find a more efficient way to make them, but yea, they do add a lot to the atmosphere. I just got Amplify Color, it's a color grading tool for Unity. I haven't started using it yet, but from what I've read, you can add these blocks that allow for color grading changes to occur.

I think this will allow me to further contrast indoor and outdoor spaces. Right now, I want a really strong light when you're indoors so the shadows are more moody. But the problem is when you step outside, that light is so strong that all the colors just seem really pale. I think Amplify Color would allow me to fix this. Will update here when I start using it!

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #208 - 05/03/2015

Weekend was spent doing more architecture stuff. Takes a lot of time to tweak the room size, etc.

Here are some screenshots:

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #208 - 05/06/2015

Continuing to work on World 002. Got the world wrapping working!

Definitely needs some optimization work, but it runs quite well as a standalone build.

[marcgfx]

it looks like you are adding a lot of details, have you noticed an impact on performance?
I was also wondering how you are creating the levels. is a lot done procedurally, or all manual slave work?