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[Dascu]

The fur shader looks really great and I'm wondering if you could go into anymore detail about the mechanics behind it? Is it physics based or related to the characters position or some other method?

It's a vertex shader for quads that deforms them based on the player's position. Here's where I sourced the code: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/rolling-my-own-quality-physics-grass-system.134153/

For the implementation in-game, I made a fur-patch prefab in Unity, painted it over the model and then merged the quads all into one object to cut down drawcalls. The result is what you see, with only a tiny impact on the framerate.

[Dascu]

It's been some time since I've posted any updates. That's mostly due to a lot of work going on behind the scenes and not being very visible or not in a state that I wanted to show it yet. Plus, being busy with fulltime job.

Anyway, the past weeks I've been working mostly on building the city of The Godbeast. Here are two snapshots from a work in progress area in Google SketchUp:




The level of detail is rather low so far. It's more greyboxing the playable area than anything. But a key visual aspect is already clear, namely the use of statues. I plan to have a lot of statues of the various animal-based gods and deities in the city. The areas will also have a mixture of classical architecture and more modern skyscraper aspects.

[Pixel Noise]

Really like some of the concept art and setting. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses visually

[quan]

this looks really cool, posting to follow.

[mtarini]

Isn't this a thing of beauty.
Amazing job on the aesthetics.
The fur sequence is super (good thinking with the shader).
The way these monsters are designed is top notch. Both they are cool.
I also like the overall aesthetics in your first screens, I wouldn't mind that style in the final game, including hues and colors.

Keep up the great work! I really want to see this one deliver.
And, pretty please, also keep us updated, if you can.

[Dascu]

Two gifs for #screenshotsaturday. As stated before, it's kind of supposed to be Shadow of the Colossus in a dark, cyberpunk-ish environment. Everything is work in progress obviously, though it somewhat conveys the general look of the game.

[Dascu]

Been doing work on shaders lately. Real-time grass displacement taking into account up to 10 moving objects (I could scale it up higher even with probably minimal performance cost). Also adapted the gradient colour shader to the grass. The deer herd further has AI to avoid and run around the player, though it's not very noticable in this gif.

Also the grass is a combined mesh on build, so it's only like a handful of drawcalls.

[Dascu]

Work the past few days has been on developing one of the bigger beasts, a large stag. I will focus on developing this one further and create a sort of vertical slice based around hunting this creature. For now, here's a .gif of the player climbing on the stunned beast.



The climbing movement in The Godbeast is inspired by games such as Shadow of the Colossus and Dragon's Dogma. You basically move, in whichever direction you wish, between nodes on the body of the monster. It's not quite as detailed as SotC itself, but it's also a lot more freeform than many other games climbing mechanics.

Once on the beast, you will have to manage your stamina a bit, as hanging upside down, moving around and using your weapon to stab the creature will all drain energy. Furthermore, shaking movement of the beast itself will also knock you down if you don't have enough stamina to withstand the blow.

The goal is for the player to move around the beast, while managing stamina as described, to stab the enemy and whittle down its health. You can do damage on various "zones", corresponding to the different limbs (e.g. the back, the torso, the neck, shoulders and hips). Not all of the zones' health has to be depleted, but there may be strategic advantages or disadvantages. E.g. damaging the hips will decrease the running speed of the beast or prevent it from doing certain stomping attacks with its hind legs.

Note that the stag shown here is also going to be one of the smallest beasts in the game.

[Dascu]

Finally got this thing to work:



I've adapted the lighting to be more cel-shaded in general, by introducing a ramp approach in Unity's deferred lighting shader. Next to that, as evident in the .gif, I've set up an object to shoot out blood drops by means of a trail renderer, which on collision with objects, creates a point light. This point light emits a very intense red light which fades out of existance.

Thanks to the cel-shaded ramp, the red light forms a nice clean circle instead of the usual, gradual light. The blood trails and lights are also set up to avoid and ignore certain objects that are not on the same layer. This way I can have them only affect the actual environment while ignoring the Player or other moving objects (or in the .gif, a random cube to test it).

The lighting and shaders are also set up so that a white/colorless light brightens up the area, as it should, while colored lights will force their color and somewhat override the basic color of the object it's hitting.

The general point of this all is so that I can leave blood trails, from wounded creatures, on a cel-shaded environment.

[Saijin_Naib]

Looks great!

Currently getting my handed to me in Malebolgia, so I'm looking forward to any further projects from you.

[BeardTopher]

This is coming along beautifully 

[Dascu]

I've been working on the harpoon throw mechanic. I want this to be a fast and fun way of damaging enemies, but at the same time I do not want to slow down the pace of the gameplay nor make it too overpowered.

The current implementation is therefore:
- No free aiming, you throw only at the locked on target.
- Instantaneous, no pausing or holding the button before you throw.
- Cancel into throw from a roll, so you can e.g. dodge an enemy and quickly punish with a harpoon.
- Limited amount of harpoons: you can carry up to three harpoons for throwing purposes, but you can gather those you've thrown from the enemies' corpses.

Looks great!

Currently getting my handed to me in Malebolgia, so I'm looking forward to any further projects from you.

Thanks! Malebolgia's a bit crude and rough around the edges. I want this game to be much more refined and enjoyable.

[Dascu]

I've been working on water this week. Several things to note, though not all of them that visible:

• The foam around the player is based on the code I used for grass/foliage displacement: The shader checks proximity to the player and then colors the pixel white (for foam) or blue (for water), in a wavey circular pattern (basically two circles which move and scale a bit randomly).
• The foam around the edges of the buildings is rather... hacked together. Since the water is flat and all my buildings are static, instead of messing around with a clever shader or something (see on that the devlog of fellow Belgian dev PajamaLlama on water effects in Flotsam), I just modelled the offset border (easy to do with the Offset tool in Google SketchUp). That border mesh is then simply colored white, dropped on top of the normal blue water and, similar to the foam around the player, moves a bit back and forth. So both of these foams are handled by shaders, no animated textures or anything.
• For the waves and bubbles while moving, this is all done via particle effects in Unity.

Next up is building the forest, modelling the trees and bushes, placing them all into the map and making sure the framerate does not utterly collapse.

[muppetWolf]

I'm having a blast following this devlog. The whole perpetual night/neo-noir thing reminds me of Dark City. Keep up the good work!

[Dascu]

Thanks!

I posted this on Twitter so I may as well post it here too:

[ashtonmorris]

Wow this looks awesome 

[Dascu]

Not much to say about this one, just a shot of the player running next to a flock of deer in the forest/grass plains area.

[Kyle Preston]

Real purdy, excited to see progress on this one 

Note that the stag shown here is also going to be one of the smallest beasts in the game.

And now I'm beeeeyond excited.

[Dascu]

Showed the game a bit at an indie dev get-together here in Brussels earlier this week, where the idea hit me that I could easily adapt the beast-climbing system to also work with the smaller animals. Which then gave me this idea:



Fast-travel by grabbing on to deer!

[Dascu]

Two new ones, showing off the player grabbing on to the giant owl.