aw man i actually love the motion blur a bit! maybe make it toggleable?
always love seein how this fuckin thing comes along
Ah, thanks, I think the real issue is when the camera moves. Static angles are fine. In any case I've disabled it for now because I wasn't able to hit a happy medium between all the settings but I'll probably revisit it in the future because there are definitely situations where it looks super nice. It's also possible that the solution is just to disable it while there's camera motion going on.
this last gif makes the game really impressive man
the post processing is nice and gives a new look and feel to you work
don't know if that's your intentions regarding everything you already shared
One thing I have noticed is that the dog movements seem so much less arbitrary. Now they can keep themselves better from falling randomly.
Can't wait to see the progress.
BTW, do you have a launch date or something?
Will you build a mac version (yeah sorry for that, I work on a mac, andI don't have a PC to play games...)?
Thanks! Ultimately the look in that gif is too muddy IMO. It looks "nice" but it's not the right style. To that end I've been experimenting with some stuff I'll detail more below.
As far as launch dates and platforms, it's a little early for me to be locking down any of those details. No clue on a date, but since I'm using unity and not making heavy use of custom shaders (at least so far) I'd definitely like to aim for a mac release as well.
These dogs have become so beautiful and diverse.
Thank you! I wanna get them even more diverse when I get more into content creation!
Just to let you know I am following this devlog
Looking forward to more updates!
Thanks for following along!
--
So, I upgraded to Unity 5.6 to get some post FX stack fixes I wanted to play with. Things were mostly smooth except for one fun bug I spent some time tracking down.
I was noticing that my dogs were, uh, sort of turning partly invisible. A little concerning tbh. After some investigation I finally got consistent reproduction and figured out that the issue was with skinned meshes and physics. Unity has a default option to disable renderers when they're offscreen, which makes a lot of sense. However, after upgrading to 5.6 if a skinned mesh is jointed to another physics object and dragged offscreen via that physics interaction, when it comes back on the screen again it stays disabled. My "workaround" for now is to disable this feature for my skinned meshes. I submitted a bug report to unity, which they were able to reproduce, and fingers crossed it gets fixed sometime soon.
And then I've done a little bit of graphical exploration. First I real quick tried to make my dogs a 3D eye to see how it would look. The answer to that, by the way, is that it looks horrifying.
Obviously the style I went with has more than a little to do with that, but there are other reasons not to go with 3D eyes for now. For one, the 2D eyes are much more readable from the default camera distance at the moment, and since eyes are a major way I'm showing emotion right now that's pretty important. The other reason to stick to 2D eyes is that I need a variety of emotes for all my eye sets and doing that in 3D is much more work than keeping it in 2D. The downside of 2D eyes is of course that placement and size variation is not super on the table, at least as long as I keep the eyes as direct textures on the head models, but I think trading those features for content creation speed is acceptable for now.
I also tried to put in single-mesh legs but was having difficulty setting up the models such that each segment could scale independently. It's a little beyond my rigging skill level at the moment so I'll probably revisit that later on.
And then I also bought a really nice and very customizable toon shader from the asset store. I've done a first pass at integrating it and you can see a comparison shot below.
Top is with the shader, bottom is without. It's not the most obvious change, I'll admit, but especially in motion I think it looks much nicer. A lot of the game uses fairly flat geometry so it's more subtle than it could be but you can see the difference more easily if you look at the dog ear tips and noses.
A lot of the subtlety here is intentional, and I'll explain why. Because there's a lot of flat geometry and wobbly physics objects, a very sharp shadow ramp looks super wonky and bad when applied globally. The dog bodies in particular look mega dumb with high intensity toon shading because they get an ever-bouncing shadow attached to them.
Not good. Jiggly flat planes like this need need smoothing with their shadows. Making things more subtle means the toon effect is less immediately noticeable, especially in screenshots or compressed gifs, but in person and in motion things look crisper and more stylized than they did before and I really do think it's an improvement. I'll also probably continue to tweak the settings as the game evolves.
And then today I spent some time with genetics. I added a global scale modifier gene and in the process noticed a few things with super genes that had just never been hooked up (there were some leftover hardcoded values that bypassed the ones set in the gene tool), so I fixed a few bugs in the process.
Lastly, I've been doing some serious thinking about the game's direction. Nothing to talk about yet but I'm hoping to close in on some more concrete ideas about the game's high level direction and moment to moment interaction soon (like within the next week). For the first time basically since I've started this project, thanks to some work a few weeks back, I'm actually no longer concerned about my dogs' basic ability to move themselves from point to point. There are still improvements to be made and it's not perfect, but it's legitimately in a good place and I can't begin to tell you how much of a weight that is to have lifted off my shoulders. That said, my shrinking concern for core tech has made it more obvious than ever that I need a content plan. I've tried stuff in the past that hasn't worked and I've learned a lot about what is and isn't fun to do with these guys, so I'm hoping I can lock in on something good here. I've got some high level ideas but they need details to be actionable. We'll see!
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