Ben's been busy these days, so I'm going to steal his thunder again (lovingly). We've got some interesting spatial transitions in mind, and we needed these various spaces to feel genuinely different. One way we're trying to do this is with some global lighting/fog states. Ben has them keeping pretty elegantly, but here's an example:
Today I tested a bit of how the look and feel of interior spaces might go. I like it! transitioning will not be trivial, but we've got some cool ideas for these cave spaces:
So, I don't want to steal Ben's thunder since he's the one who has kept this thing moving, but I thought I'd atleast post in here since we've actually been trucking away on this thing, and now that our new baby is sleeping a bit more, I have some bloody time to work on it again!!
Ben did some awesome work with feel in the game (I'll let him explain) and I've been doing level design, based on our new 'mechanic' of looping. Ben introduced it around the time of his last post, and it's AWESOME.
You're bascially stuck in an infinite loop of terrain until you collect a new terrain seed - this basically tacks on the next chunk of terrain. It's simple & glorious, and really opens things up to lot of different simple mechanics
skill based jumps to find new seeds
exploration to find new seeds
multiple seeds/aka multiple paths
platforming loops to reach new areas in a looping chunk (this one is super cool)
and this is just the tip of the iceberg (snowy pun unintended - oh god, I'm a dad aren't I, these JOKES)
Here's a big air looping level with one such seed:
A few other level sections from that day's design session
So today I started a fresh level to test a few methods we'll be using going forward. First and foremost is Unity terrain as a starting point. We reverse engineered our old terrain from the Jam terrain mesh, and that was a headache. Assuming we're going to use Unity terrain moving forward, how easy is it? Pretty easy!
Next up was trees. I love back country riding, so trees are important to me. While 'too many' is attainable - this density is actually totally ride-able at speed. Fun? Not sure yet.
And finally, just in time for the build we snuck in a pinch of missing sound design. Basically just a few sounds that help give a bit of feedback to the player. Namely the sound of surfaces they're riding on, and a bit of wind. Three sounds derived from white noise can add so much.
There are some one shot sounds in that first half (all prelim stuff btw), but we're missing things like wind, snow and other surface sounds - it adds a lot. We ended up implementing them pretty crudely (this is a mockup) but they really contribute a lot to this simple little game we're building.
So Ben totally killed it on level design - the build heading to FA is a lot of fun (if a bit advanced/impenetrable - but that's OK). I've been swamped with baby stuff - but managed to spend a bit of time on trees and sound design.
And by trees I mean these things:
It's a quick first implementation, but they add a lot to the spaces, both in terms of mild traversal obstacles, but also add to the sense of motion
So, Unity's terrain brushes are quite frustrating - but amplified by the fact the the default terrain that is generated by a new terrain object is kind of garbage... anyway, progress!
It's rough, but I'm going to try to rebuild our Jam level in Unity terrain. Should be interesting re: the concave sections, but we'll figure it out...
If you are looking for a way of populating objects on the surface of meshes that are not terrain I've found success with Quickbrush. If you ever need a surface that is not convex, Unity's terrain won't work.
if you guys still want that faceted look, Polyworld converts unity terrain to a polygonal look
Yeah, I saw this! looks really cool - if we're still lusting after the polygonal look this is definitely the way we'll go. ALSO, damn to I wish polyworld existed when we made FRACT!
Wow, the work Ben has done has really changed the feel of the game for the better. Before, it was a faster moving FPS with no friction, now it really feels like you have weight and momentum - it's exhilarating.
Today I started toying with the unity terrain instead of the meshes I generated in c4d. If we can get it working, it has a great many advantages
The biggest being a much easier workflow for editing terrain in the context of objects in the space. This allows us to iterate on aspects of the terrain in engine versus me pushing vertices around in cinema 4D.
Nice smooth test terrain:
I can now easily work snow drifts around objects - a many step process with our previous terrain
It also allows us to use some of Unity's inbuilt tools for populating objects on the surface of terrain. Backcountry snowboarding is a big part of my style of riding and I want to reflect this in the game where appropriate. Unity's tree paint tools should help me achieve this in a much more manageable way. I'll report on that soon!
We do lose that lovely faceted look by using unity terrain, but Ben pointed out it allows us to further differentiate between terrain and objects. By placing polygonal objects on a smooth terrain, we achieve that much more visual contrast - I think he's right.
While I'm no master of unity terrain, I feel like this will make building the separate islands easier and these first tests are quite positive. I wish the brush tools in unity weren't so horrible though, and find myself starting with a height map in order to get anywhere.
So today I'm going to tinker with using Unity terrain instead of our mesh terrain. It will make life easier and Ben had the insight to suggest that smooth terrain might make for a good visual contrast between snow and objects.
Spent the day removing a shortcut I had stuck in and had forgotten about. Previously I was clamping velocity to a max speed, it was an easy way to not have to fiddle with friction, gravity and player force values. However it leads to situations where you pick up a bunch of speed somewhere like descending a super steep slope or hitting a booster and then lose that speed a lot faster than you should.
So I removed the max speed clamps then tweaked friction and gravity values to properly control the player's speed instead.
I have now. Looks great. But I don't understand the relevance. If you are pointing it out for it's similar visual style, then ok, I agree they have similar visual styles. But my points still stand.
I made FRACT, so some of my techniques are going to carry over here. I suspect that's what he was getting at.
At least a third person view of some character would have been nice. Unless it's a first person game? I didn't quite understand which one it's supposed to be.
The idea of the game is nice, but I believe it will require two things to get right for it to be successful: - great environments, so basically excellence in environment art - a great set of combos/tricks, with the level design to support them and make them shine
Definitely agree with the first point - and am confident that both Ben and I can make that happen. The second point is something, which at this point, seems at odds with our design goals. Think Proteus on a snowboard, and that might get you in the right mindset.
Sorry of the lack of updates, trying to get back on it ( )
A Quick Note on Scale in FRACT OSCAn aspect of FRACT OSC that we’re trying to develop further than the original FRACT prototype is that of scale. There are some really, really big machines and architectural elements in the world.
For myself personally, this is the magic of synthetic worlds; building impossible and inspiring spaces. Why restrict ourselves when we’ve got virtually limitless tools, right? In any case, I’ve been getting a few enquiries about scale after posting the following little clips:
And to illustrate the scale of the machines and the world here’s a cute little diagram showing the size of the player vs one of the main machines in the game (the player being only a few pixels tall, even at a fairly generous resolution):
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