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[drycactus]

NOTE: If you're after the Greenlight stats, please scroll down

Hi everyone,
after months of hiding in a cave and working away at Poly Bridge, I feel like it's time to start sharing the development journey with the wider community.

Poly Bridge is a fresh take on the classic bridge-building genre with a strong community focus, currently close to completion and soon to hit Steam Greenlight and other distribution platforms.

The game features many building blocks, including hydraulic pistons that change the shape of a bridge, suspension bridges, cables, etc.

The feature that is being worked on the most at the moment is our Sandbox/Creator mode, which allows players to go crazy within the world, design their own puzzles, upload, download, challenge friends to beat their score and other neat things.

We love bridge-building games so decided to build a game that we would get endless hours of playtime from, and hopefully other players will enjoy playing it too and create a thriving online community with loads of free levels for everyone to solve.

Videos and Screens

Early Access

If you or anyone you know is interested in playing the game today, please just head over to http://drycactus.com/press/sheet.php?p=poly_bridge to request a copy.


To-do List

There is still plenty to do, as always, but here's a list of the major features that are being worked on: [completion estimates in brackets]:

• Create assets for two more environments (Desert [70%], Ancient Ruins [20%])
• Make an easy to use but fully featured Sandbox mode [60%]
• Create the online community back-end to allow level sharing [20%]

Store Description

Unleash your engineering creativity with an engaging and fresh bridge-building simulator with all the bells and whistles.
Enjoy hours of physics-based puzzle solving with the 60+ levels and then jump into the Sandbox mode to create your own bridge designs.
Don't forget to join the Online Community, where you can share your own creations and download, rate and play other engineers designs.

Featuring:

• A wide array of building blocks
• Hydraulic joints to create shape-changing structures (ex: drawbridges)
• Sandbox mode to create your own mad designs
• Online community to share designs and interact with
• Steamworks integration to challenge your friends
• For PC, Mac and Linux

Questions or Comments

If you have any questions, feedback or comments I'd love to hear from you.

Poly Bridge is a labor of love and I really would like to give the bridge-building community the game that we deserve, so if you're a fan of the genre please don't hesitate to get in touch!

Thanks for reading,
Patrick

[drycactus]

Just implemented animated GIF recording, so when you pretty bridge collapses you can show your friends on the interwebs.
So 90s, but somehow still super cool.

[Daze Hill]

Like the poly-miniature model syle :D ... The game looks polished enough too!  And nice physics on the break of the bridge, very impressive!

[marcgfx]

I like the concept and the implementation looks solid. I guess the available resources are limited in some way to make the levels challenging? It looks like you are using a anti-perspective (is that even a word), where things get bigger when they are far away, whats the reason for that?

[drycactus]

Yep, resources are limited and there is a lot of variation when it comes to level design, small cars weight much less than a big van or a bus, some bridges are very long and multi-deck and might require you to allow a ship (or three) to pass under the bridge, or cross paths, among other things.

The camera is just orthographic, nothing too special there, we wanted to give a feeling of model-like scale while keeping a clean isometric-ish feel to it.
Really, just an ortho cam with limited movement

[TimBob12]

This looks like a lot of fun!  I really really love the style, especially the way the ship comes out of the fog to go under the bridge.

What engine are you using for it?

The only thing I would say is it looks a little weird how the water is unaffected when the bridge collapses into it.  If you could get waves and ripples being made that would look awesome (imo) but if it's a design decision not to cos of low poly stuff then that's cool too.  Still looks awesome!

[marcgfx]

I had to get a ruler to make sure, but yeah... it really is just orthographic projection, but it really threw me off! I second the splashing idea, would be really cool if you can get that done.

[Paul]

Love these kinds of games and this one looks extra awesome! That boat and the way the bridge hoists up is brilliant! you could try a tilt shift effect to give it a miniature look too, although the graphics are really nice as is

[drycactus]

Thanks for the tips on tilt-shift, it hadn't really come to mind, I'll definitely look into it and how viable it is as a post effect.

The game is developed using Unity, nothing fancy.

And yes, water splashes, ripples and turbulence are definitely on the wish-list, I've played around quite a bit with it but couldn't get anything decent going so just leaving it plain for now while I focus on the online/sandbox and gameplay stuff.
The water is a simple plane with a custom shader that does vertex displacement, so making it dynamic would require a re-work of that approach I think.

As mentioned in the original post, if anyone's keen on actually trying the game you can easily request a copy at http://drycactus.com/press/sheet.php?p=poly_bridge

[drycactus]

So after some research and messing around, here's a first working version of dynamic water that ripples when an objects breaks its surface.
Still many improvements to be done but not looking too shabby, what do you think?



For the curious parties, this is a custom shader that animates the constant undulation with a sine/time function offseting vertices, and adds the ripple movement and "foam" with a texture that is generated on the fly at each frame, 1 pixel for each vertex of water, the ripple intensity is calculated by the distance of a circle that keeps growing and loses force as it spreads out.
Hope that makes sense.

[drycactus]

Some more water dynamics, each piece of road causes a ripple, so do the vehicles.

Side to side comparison: 
BEFORE                                                     AFTER
   

[TimBob12]

That looks pretty damn awesome!  I love how it's almost like a fishtank haha.  Add some particles in there and it will look almost perfect

[i2nQuinn]

Looks great! Like bridge builder had a baby with fantastic contraption. My only criticism at this point is that the water ripples look smooth, which is at odds with the triangley surface - does it need the ripple/foam texture?

[drycactus]

Hey everyone, happy to share the new trailer which is up at


and we went live on Greenlight today, exciting and nervous times!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=409292391

[roboy]

This looks fantastic - would love to give this a play!

[drycactus]

I've found it really useful when other devs publish their Greenlight stats, so I will be doing the same in this thread at 24 hour intervals and perhaps a write-up at the eventual end of the journey.

Campaign Page:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=409292391

24 hours into the Greenlight campaign



Any questions feel free to ask.

[drycactus]

48 hours into the Greenlight campaign

[drycactus]

72 hours into the Greenlight campaign

Broke into the Top 100 and sitting at #84

[drycactus]

96 hours intro the Greenlight campaign

A bunch of stuff was Greenlit this morning, so we climbed the ranks a little more.

[Melon Mason]

Great job! The visual style is lovely. As a consumer, I've never really liked these kind of games, but you've gotten me interested for sure.