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[unit187]

Hello, everybody! Name's Artem, I represent indie gamedev team Sand Sphere Games. In this thread we will share news on our game Ancient Rivals.

Ancient Rivals is hardcore hack&slash mobile game that is somewhat similar to Dark Souls. Every combat move your hero does matters. Even weakest monster can defeat the hero if he (or she) isn't careful with timing their attacks.

Our small team is working on the game for around year and a half. We had ups and downs, made lots of mistakes, but managed to continue our journey. Today the team consists of two people:

- Kirill as a programmer,
- Artem as a technical artist.

Having so few people definitely forces us to wear way too many hats :)

Recently we have released new video that showcases some work we did during last few months:

Recently we have released new video that showcases some work we did during last few months:





We also love to share our knowledge with fellow develops, so we regularly write gamedev-related articles. For example, there is an article about coroutines in Unity, and this one is about modular level design kits. You can see more materials on our blog. We plan to add more good reads as we go.

You can also follow us on Twitter.
Thanks!

[unit187]

Just a little update! 

[unit187]

Hello everybody again!
We had a rough time and the project was frozen for a while, but we are back on track now!
We plan to post weekly updates, including news and gamedev articles aimed at developers, because we want to share knowledge we have gained.

At this moment I would like to post a couple fresh screenshots of game levels. As you can see, they are a bit cleaner than before and got updated lighting without artifacts.

[unit187]

Meanwhile we have updated our blog with new tutorial article on how to work with Coroutines in Unity

[unit187]

While doing level-design we use what is called modular kits. They include a number of models like walls, corner, floor tiles that easily connect to each other and allow for fast and painless design of big rich levels.
In theory it isn’t that hard to make a modular kit, but there are a number of tricks a designer should know. For instance, you will need to build a grid with cubes and use it as a reference for your finished 3d-models.



In fact, we plan to post technical articles and tutorials regularly, so stay tuned!

While we are preparing new article, we want to share a couple more screenshots of game levels made with Unity using their new Enlighten lighting system.

[yaomon17]

Reminds me of Heroes of Ruin, though it looks much nicer. Pretty great for only 2 people 

[unit187]

Reminds me of Heroes of Ruin, though it looks much nicer. Pretty great for only 2 people 

Thanks, yaomon17, we are trying our best 

Meanwhile, we are ready to post the article we have promised to deliver

[EddieBytes]

Wow, just two people? Making a 3d RPG with just two people, that's quite some undertaking! But you're doing fine so far, so good luck!

[ThilDuncan]

Great work. Looking forward to seeing some of the high tech civilisation coming through in your environments (Might I suggest a civilisation similar to 1980's earth... dust occasionally blowing to reveal billboards for Wham or Sting and the Police ;-) )

[Egberto]

The game looks great

Interesting article.

[unit187]

Thanks, guys, glad to hear kind words

Great work. Looking forward to seeing some of the high tech civilisation coming through in your environments (Might I suggest a civilisation similar to 1980's earth... dust occasionally blowing to reveal billboards for Wham or Sting and the Police ;-) )

This sounds cool. Reminds me of Starcraft II where we can walk around abandoned cities, buried under the sand
Not sure if we can pull this off though. None of us is real artist (I am more of a technical artist and my friend is a programmer) and making art takes ridiculous amount of time and energy.

[unit187]

Hey, I am back with some cool stuff to show!
 
I am working on animation and combat system for one of our heroes.
Since we are awfully bad at making art ourselves, we bought a model from amazing Bitgem.
For this gal we use Unity's mecanim and root motion animation system, which means the animation drives the character's movement in space, not the code (to some extend). Making this kind of animation is very new experience to me and it is exciting to see how it works in the game.

And now a couple of gifs! 



That was triple-hit combo. And now a charged strike.
All animation is of a prototype quality, obviously. Later I will take a time to polish them.



I don't want to bloat the thread with tons of gifs, so you can see some more of them (and a video!) on our blog.

[unit187]

Recently we have released new video that showcases some work we did during last few months:





Keep in mind it is technical alpha, means there will be a lot of changes later on.
Characters' portraits are placeholders to be replaced.

[{VeTeR}]

I like the ragdoll on dead enemies, quite satisfying.
I think that making hold trigger on coins is bad idea. Most of games goes in taking money faster: taking by click, giving a shortcut to take all coins near the player or even the auto take nearest coins.

[unit187]

Hey, everybody! Been too busy for a while to write updates, but got a couple ready.
One of recently implemented features was realtime dynamic mobile shadows which works fast on mobiles.



You can see video with shadows in action in our blog. There is also some information on how it was done by our programmer.

We also wrote new little article with some thoughts on how to keep Unity project clean. Nothing fancy, but some useful tips