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[Fenrir]

Wow amazing! 

[EDarkness]

Saw this on Twitter yesterday with the crazy orb animation.  Game definitely looks great, best of luck with it, man.

[ThePettzon]

I have been following your devlog for a while now and this game really looks amazing! Keep up the good work. I can not wait for more updates to follow your progress!

I have sent you a PM

[auroraaa]

--snip--

christ that's terrifying

but awesome. Fantastic animations. Especially the death-ray thing.

[Impmaster]

Loving the concept art on the front page.

[AriocM]

Hey Olsen, I made an account here to just share how excited I am with your project. I'm a game artist by day and at night I've been wanting to make my own mobile game with a minimalist aesthetic for a while. I got some into it with Unity's 2D Physics and realized I needed to learn more C# which is where I am now, taking evening classes and online tutorials to learn enough to code effectively.

I was building influence maps for the art style I was after when I stumbled upon your game and it looked amazing. Like you I feel fluid movement and mood conveyed with light, motion and a good pallet can really be a compelling potion. Especially for the small mobile screens I plan to build for, easy to recognize shapes and bold silhouette's are paramount .

I'm excited to see Somerville develop.

One thing I noticed in my tests was how poly flow really impact the low-poly look of shadows on the character. Would it be possible to see your main character's wireframe to get an idea of how dense you went for smooth curved shadows on the model?

[Olsen]

Thanks once again for the props guys.  I am feeding your good vibes into my work ethic!

@AriocM - Flattered you took the time to sign up and show your interest, happy my mind spills are appreciated by people such as yourself.  Yeah the minimalist art style rubs me the right way when done right.  Not to say I wouldn't love doing something crazy photoreal but I just don't have the resources.

re - the edge flow.  I find unity quite forgiving in regard to shadows on shit topology.  Trust me I need a serious clean up from someone that knows how to model plus I use a custom shader to simplify the falloff as I see fit.  I'll sort you out a model of the main character with wireframe on shaded tonight.

Cheers

Chris

[kanabeach]

very impressive, very nice, have you a date for a demo or for the game?

[mummydude]

Hey, this game looks really cool! I like the kinda TRON-ish vibe.

[Olsen]

thanks mummydude!

very impressive, very nice, have you a date for a demo or for the game?

Cheers! Not officially.  Set myself an October deadline for a prologue and mini crunch.  See how it goes.

[Olsen]

PATHFINDING AND AI STUFFS

This month is all implementation and dragging all my prototyping into a cohesive whole.  Needed to learn path finding. Unity made things easy with navmeshes but they're all focused on grounded AI.  Had to implement a dodgy offset system to the floaty droney love.

[slarti88]

Whoa whoa 

That decapitation puts the guillotine to shame. This is fantastic!

[Christian]

Those animations! So fluid!

[hiddensignal]

This is looking absolutely amazing, especially the animation work. Very inspiring for someone that's also working to develop a cinematic platformer.

Could you share more screens of your Mecanim setup, drilling down into the movement? Especially the turning from left to right, and where that transition fits in.

I'm trying to get a proper setup; putting in states where the anim is mirrored seems like the wrong way to go about it, since so much would be duplicated. But having a blend tree from left to right, with a negative to positive speed parameter, doesn't seem to make it easy to put in transitions. (EDIT: Do you rotate the sub-gameobject 180 degrees in code, and somehow make the turn animation sync up?) Anything you could share would be helpful. Thanks!

[Olsen]

@hiddensignal - hey dude, sorry i'll get a proper response to you soon.  Been completely swamped at work and then I come home and get drowned in gamedev, so haven't been able to check in here regularly.  I'll post you something soon.  SORRY! 

Olsen

[Olsen]

BASIC MOVEMENT SETUP

Here is my ever growing cluster-fuckery. The top pic is my movement master tree containing the mecanim substate groups. I use playmaker as I can't code for shit but I've essentially created an FSM that feeds into mecanim saying what direction I'm looking in (start state being default right facing) in accordance to what direction I've pushed the stick toward with a bool value to signal that I'm turning to trigger 180 anims.  I don't mirror any anims as I'm fine with them looking different on either side and have animated to that. I duplicate the existing animations in Unity and drop them into mecanim as a faux left-side right-side setup.  Maybe in the future I'll swap out those cloned anims for proper ones (gun hand swaps etc) but this'll do for now.

I report on both input amount on the analogue stick and velocity of the player controller in gamespace and have mecanim decide between these parameters what to play. 

Apologies for my simplistic waffle but I hope that helps.

[Olsen]

DRONE EXECUTIONS

So I've implemented the counter attack shield system and have the drone laying on the ground waiting for me to animate a kill.  What better way than a nasty curb stomp. 

[jctwood]

The title drone executions is pretty poignant, will there be any themes that touch on drones being used to detach governments from violence?

[Olsen]

The title drone executions is pretty poignant, will there be any themes that touch on drones being used to detach governments from violence?

Nice observation but unfortunately not.  This is not however ruling out my intent to reflect our race's current state once we enter the thick of the story. 

I have become some what seduced in the last few years in a healthy pessimist frame of mind; whether consciousness bears any significance and the fear of losing it that can run civilisations into the ground.  Even if we get through all the hardship to some utopia as a species, will it be worth it considering the miserable cost.  I think JOHN as a main character is starting to represent treading this path of cling or let go.  I'd say it's through-line and the questions it asks are the strongest reasons for me continuing. I must, however, finish it quickly.  As I fear I may change the way I see life half way through and not deliver an honest piece of work.

Anyway, sorry for the splurge, got myself excited.

[hiddensignal]

BASIC MOVEMENT SETUP
...
 I don't mirror any anims as I'm fine with them looking different on either side and have animated to that. I duplicate the existing animations in Unity and drop them into mecanim as a faux left-side right-side setup.  Maybe in the future I'll swap out those cloned anims for proper ones (gun hand swaps etc) but this'll do for now.

Ahh. Thanks a ton for sharing. So you do have separate left and right states in Mecanim—I'm guessing those are all the duplicated states in the second screenshot, such as "RUN" and "RUN 0"? I was hoping there was a way to avoid that, but seems necessary to transition the turning.


Nice stomp. It's the hands going up in the air that give it some oomph.