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[rocket5tim]

A while back we posted about changing the look of the game's main character.  Well I'm happy to report that the operation was a success and that Cecil made it through the process without any serious complications.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of old vs. new Cecil models in the game:


The big changes to look for are: he has ears, sideburns and a nose and we scaled up the mustache. We're also thinking of scaling up his bangs.

The next problem to solve is that the character looks pretty flat in the game and he doesn't really stand out against most of the backgrounds.  All of the lighting information in the game is baked into the static textures and all dynamic objects (like the player) receive lighting information from Light Probes.  While the light probes do a great job of helping dynamic objects look like they're moving in and out of light correctly, they're not all that great and showing finer shadow details like you'd expect to see on a main character.  I've been searching around for a good mobile-optimized shader solution for a while and then yesterday the Toony Colors Pro shader pack was on sale on the Unity asset store so I thought I'd check it out.


Click the image to see the full sized version

Using the Toony Colors Pro/Normal/OneDirLight/Basic shader with the "old school" ramp and 1 dynamic directional light, you can see that Cecil "pops" much better in the scene without being all blown out like you get with just Unity's default mobile diffuse shader and a directional light.  He also has nice shading across his contours thanks to the ramp texture.

Next I'll be adding a "blob" shadow under the player to help root him to the wold.  For that I'm going to try to use Fast Shadows (also on the Unity asset store), but I haven't looked into it enough to know for sure how well it'll work in this game.

If you have any tips on character shaders or lighting, let me know.

[rocket5tim]

Hello friends, especially those in the Toronto area, we are going to be holding our first official beta test session for The Phantom P.I. on Monday October 7th at Bento Miso starting at 6:30.

The session will be part of Bento's bi-weekly "Games With Friends" event so there will be lots of other games to play including board games and Huskerball!

Please feel free to invite your friends too. We hope to see you there!

More info: https://bentomiso.com/events/42-games-with-friends

[rocket5tim]

Yesterday I spent some time making a speech bubble system for the characters in our game.  Here's an example of it in action:



We don't have the animations for talking on the phone yet, but those will be in soon (for now Famke just plays her idle animation while talking on it).  The cool thing about this system is that the bubble sprite and text are rendered using its own Orthographic camera which eliminates sorting issues that would occur if they were being rendered by the game's Perspective camera.  Next step is to apply this system to a cinematic that has 2 characters talking to each other.

[hube]

I see you're working on similar things Getting speech bubbles to get some dialogs going. I rendered mine with the GUI ... not sure if that was the best choice now that I read your post here. I'll have to re-think it. Right now I need to plan out how I'm going to build the dialog trees and more importantly how I'm going to get some dialog options to trigger events in game instead of just more dialogs.

Looking good!!

[rocket5tim]

I see you're working on similar things Getting speech bubbles to get some dialogs going. I rendered mine with the GUI ... not sure if that was the best choice now that I read your post here. I'll have to re-think it. Right now I need to plan out how I'm going to build the dialog trees and more importantly how I'm going to get some dialog options to trigger events in game instead of just more dialogs.

I went with this approach because I wanted to keep the draw calls as low as possible and wanted to avoid the performance hits that might come with using the GUI system.  But the downside of rendering the text bubbles with a 2nd camera is that they draw over the top of everything.  Normally that would be fine, but I have a couple of cases where I want another object to draw in front of them.  So now I need to rethink how I'm doing this.

I could position the bubble background and text objects in 3d space but then there's going to be z-fighting between the text and the background when the camera is at extreme angles to the bubble.

[rocket5tim]

Two new gameplay screenshots for screenshot saturday.  Also posted these to reddit.

Where to next?


Let's see what's up here!

[rocket5tim]

We've made a ton of progress on the game overt the last few weeks and we've been totally heads-down so unfortunately I haven't had any time to post updates lately but I'm hoping to get back to regular posts any day now. 

In the mean time, here's a blog post that our assistant producer Christine wrote about our recent haunted Toronto research outing: Haunted Toronto: The R5 Team Walks with the Ghosts

[hube]

So whats new here - it's been a month!

[rocket5tim]

So whats new here - it's been a month!

Haha, only a month? It feels like A LOT longer.  I've been totally focused on getting the game to an Alpha state so that we can submit to Megabooth before the deadline on Sunday and also to update our extremely old IGF build.  We also did the Bit Bazaar event here in Toronto last weekend and that took up a ton of our time. I should have more time to do dev updates after this weekend so you should be seeing more from us soon. Thanks for the PUSH Hube!

[rocket5tim]

We're still alive and hello 2014! I spent the last couple of months totally heads-down trying to get the game to Alpha (which I did!). Finally we can see how the whole game feels and flows (well the first 9 levels of it anyway).  We had a lot of people play the game at Bit Bazaar in December and got a lot of promising feedback so I feel like we're on the right track towards releasing a fun game.

I'll post some new dev updates soon, in the meantime here's a look at the new game logo that was designed by one of our artists Jen Schollen.

[ephoete]

Hey nice progression, really cool logo, very pro and catchy.

[rocket5tim]

Hey nice progression, really cool logo, very pro and catchy.

Thanks ephoete! I'll pass your feedback on to our artist!

[rocket5tim]

We had a pretty intense crunch heading into the holidays where we brought the game to an Alpha phase and then I took a couple of weeks off to decompress and clear my head.  Half of the levels have been built and most of the UI and Journal interface are functional although they will still be tweaked and tuned as development progresses towards Beta.

Teleporter/Cauldron design:
The next batch of levels will introduce some new puzzle mechanics, the first of which is the telporters which we're calling Cauldrons.  Basically cauldrons are doors - one cauldron leads to another cauldron of the same color.  You create a path between 2 cauldrons by using a colored spell on a cauldron that is not already active.

Simple example: There are 2 Cauldrons in a a level, 1 is inactive and the other one is emitting pink smoke.  The player uses a pink potion on the inactive Cauldron which creates a link between them.  Now the player can interact with either Cauldron and be teleported between them.

More complex example: There are 3 Cauldrons, 1 is inactive, 1 is emitting blue smoke and 1 is emitting pink smoke.  The player can use either a blue potion or a pink potion on the inactive Cauldron to create a link to one of the others.

Lets say that the player made a link from the inactive Cauldron to the pink Cauldron. Now there are 2 pink Cauldrons and 1 blue Cauldron.  The player teleports to the 2nd pink Cauldron, finds a blue potion and uses it on the pink Cauldron that she just teleported to.  Now there are 2 blue Cauldrons and 1 pink Cauldron.  If the player wanted to return to that original Cauldron (the one that started inactive), she would need to use a Pink potion on either of the blue Cauldrons. This system can be used to create some seriously complex puzzles, especially when combined with our other mechanics.

Here's the current state of the Cauldron gameplay prototype:



Next step will be to add in animations for when Cecil pours in a potion and then he enters and exists the Cauldron.  The vfx and "thought bubble" art is also first pass so those will get some tweaks.

[rocket5tim]

I've added Cecil's character animations to the cauldron mechanic.  We're really happy with how they turned out.  The .gif doesn't really do them justice since it's only recorded at 15 fps, everything is much smoother in game especially the camera when it pans from one Cauldron to the other.



There's still one animation missing - currently the bottle just disappears when Cecil interacts with the Cauldron, we want to have the bottle fly out of his hand and land in the cauldron but we're having trouble getting the bottle's animation to bake out to the .fbx.

And a still shot of Cecil popping out just for fun.

[gamedev123]

Just stumbled upon this devlog.  Very nice-looking game.  I'll definitely keep an eye out for it.

[rocket5tim]

Just stumbled upon this devlog.  Very nice-looking game.  I'll definitely keep an eye out for it.

Thanks very much!

On an unrelated side-note, we just posted a new Unity tutorial on our blog, check it out:
Make a 2D 2-player platformer game with Unity 4.3

[rocket5tim]

We got a little mention on IndieGames.com on Friday with our #GIFriday tweet.

Here's the gif from the blog post:


And here's a longer gif from that same level showing part of a puzzle solution:

[rocket5tim]

Hey everyone! So a few news items from us since our last post.  We're going to be showing The Phantom PI in the Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX East which is just about as awesome as it gets.

We also released a new new trailer for the game which you can watch here:



And finally we showed the game at GDC Play, here's how it went:  Those of you who develop games know that there’s nothing quite as terrifying as putting your game into the hands of gamers and watching them play it for the first time. Months and sometimes years of hard work can either be validated by cheerful squeals of happy players or dashed to bits on the rocks of harsh criticism by those who don’t “get it”. Last week we took The Phantom PI Mission Apparition on the road to the 2014 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and to our relief, the response was amazing!

We estimate that about 500 people played the game over the course of the 3 day event - we had 3 stations setup and at least 2 were in use pretty much the whole time during the 3 day event. The response from gamers was overwhelming positive and nearly everyone who played took the time to tell us their thoughts on the experience. Most people felt that the controls were intuitive, that the puzzles where easy to understand yet challenging and that the game “looks beautiful” (blush)! We also got a good bit of criticism that will help us tune the game as we get closer to release – thankfully there were no real surprises, all of the critiques were totally things that we can fix and many were things that were already on our todo list.


Cathy and Christine having a little fun at our GDC Play booth

The GDC Play space was easily the most exciting and active area in the whole event, with a constant rumble of games and gamers hanging out, talking and playing with stuff they’d probably never heard of before. Compared to the South Hall which housed all of the big name companies in video games (plus the IGF nominated games) with their flashy booths and super-soft carpeting, the GDC Play space in the North Hall was noisy, casual and alive with excitement.


Cathy and Christine look over an artist’s portfolio while Adam from Asteroid Base plays The Phantom PI

We were surrounded by amazing developers from all around the world including a few of our friends like the awesome folks at Phantom Compass and the OMDC booth which allowed a bunch of Ontario developers to show off their games. We also made a few new friends at Schell Games, Shark Punch, Right Pedal Studios and Xibalba Studios.

Here's Cathy talking to the Autodesk WarpZone folks about the game plus her thoughts on why we went 3D instead of 2D:



And Christine showing the game to Alchemic-Dream: http://youtu.be/jkXV1PqeDi4

Next stop, PAX! If you're going, be sure to look for us.

[hube]

The polish on this game is looking incredible. The animations are looking great... I'm so so jealous of their smoothness.

[rocket5tim]

Thanks Hugh! Cathy said she could lend you some animation advice sometime, just let us know.