Hey there folks!

I've been messing round with particles a bit today and yesterday because I wanted to try and make a fancy fountain. On thing that has always scuppered me is getting particles to look pixel perfect in Unity. I've gotten close just by fudging numbers by they've never been "perfect". I'm happy to say that I solved that today, so here's how...

First, a demo...

Here's the not-perfect version I was messing with yesterday. You can see that it looks ok, but not "perfect", a bunch of the pixels look like 2px clumps etc.



And here's the pixel perfect version:





You can see in this static shot that the pixel of the particles match the pixel grid of the rest of the game.

So how do we achieve that result? Firstly, make sure you have your pixel perfect camera set up, this is super complicated in itself but here's a real quick rundown of how I do it:

* Import all your textures at 1 pixel per unit.
* Create a render texture the size you would like to render at (in my case 320x240).
* Point your main camera at your render texture (Target texture).
* Set your main camera to orthographic.
* Set you main camera orthorgraphic size to half your target resolution (in my case 120). (Ortho size is half the screen size).
* Create a UI canvas.
* Se the canvas to "Screen space - overlay".
* Add a raw image element to the canvas.
* Set the image to be centered and have the same dimensions as your target resolution (anchors all 0.5, position 0, size 320x240).
* Create a new material.
* Use the "Unlit/Texture" shader.
* Set the render texture as the base image on the material.

Errr, that should do it. My set up is a bit more complicated than that as I dynamically set the orthographic size depending on the size of the actual window we're rendering in, and also find the next camera when we change scenes etc. There are a million posts and articles on pixel perfect cameras out there so worth checking those out if you have problems. The major way mine differs is using a canvas and raw image to display our render texture, seems better than positioning/sizing it ourselfs. As it's a raw image it shouldn't have any performance overheads. Shout if you have any questions though.

Ok, on to particles!

I'm not going to go through the particle system bits in top down order. So let's start at the bottom in the renderer section:

* Render mode: Mesh. This was the big revelation for me, we now have a predictable thing we're working with.
* Mesh: Quad
* Material: Create your material with your particle in it. I'm just using the Sprites-Default shader.

Main particle system section:

* Start size: 32 (in my case). This is the size of your sprites in pixels (as we already set our sprites to use 1ppu).
* 3D start rotation: Yup
* x: -90, y: 0, z:0. I had to set x to -90 to get the particles to face the camera rather than face up.
* Simulation space: local
* Scaling mode: Hierarchy. I had to set this as I scale my whole world, without setting this, particles would not get scaled along with that.

That's about it! The important things are using mesh renderers and setting the start size to the size of your sprites. I have no idea how performant using meshes is vs using billboards, but it's fine for my purposes of 20-30 particles.

Don't forget you can use the Texture Sheet Animation module too. My spritesheet (set in the material) is 4x4 32px sprites so the module is set to use...

* Tiles x: 4, y: 4
* Animation: Whole sheet.

...so even though the texture being used is 128x128px, each sprite being chopped out for the animation is 32px and this so is my start size.

I hope that helps some folks. It's not really that difficult, just took a bit of poking at unity and experimenting with stuff that I'm often not certain of. Apologies if my technical writing is a bit all over the place, I'm open to feedback

Thanks! 

Just seeing this game again after awhile. I feel like the environments have come a long way, I still remember in the beginning they seemed a bit flat and now I really get a sense of depth, texture, and lighting with them. 

Cheers I've been working hard on improving my pixeling for the background stuff (still got a long way to go). Turning on FSAO has certainly helped give everything a bit more depth though

./execute.py instructions={follow thread}

((Loving the visuals and direction! I like how the gameplay reminds of Golden Sun weirdly, save it's cyberpunk but hey, it's looking sharp )

Haha, thanks!! Yes, Golden Sun is one of my favourite jrpg's. It's been a while since I played it properly, but I've fired it up a few times to check out bits of battle design etc. I love the pseudo 3d look the battles have, kinda what I was going for in the first gif here https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1348560#msg1348560

Finally! Been waiting for your update for sooo long...
So happy your game is moving forward!
This moment for me is like a ray of awesome sunshine between the shit clouds that are indie games.
Good luck!

Haha, thanks, means a lot! I'll try and update at least once a week, it's hard when there's not a lot to show though, I'm not sure if updates about fixing bugs are that exciting :s

Hey folks,

Lot's of under the hood fixes over the last week. Making long lists of menu items scroll nicely, making enemies drop money after defeat and fixing an issue with sprite offsets.
That last thing has been something I've been meaning to do since I created my own tile slicing editor. Unity's own tile slicer is a bit of a pain, to give a sprite an offset you have to specify it in values between 0 and 1, which is not ideal, as you have to manually calculate that when dealing with pixel art. So originally I had just not bothered with setting exact offsets in the tile slicer and instead made a quick component that I attached to all the battle characters that would calculate their positions using an offset.



The yellow line at the bottom of the sprite shows the offset.

So, to cut a long story short. Using my own tile slicer that I added the ability to set offsets using pixels, I had to go and reslice all my actors spritesheets and set their offset correctly. As well as removing the offset component from all their prefabs. Not hard work, but certainly boring.

Lastly this week I've been working on a new environment. This one is a bit different though. In the game you will be able o "dive in" to a software construct, so I wanted it to look kinda like the matrix, cyberspacey, circuitry kinda thing. I wasn't sure if what I had in my head was going to work, but I think I'm getting somewhere close to it.

Here's my first attempt at a shader to get that effect. (Also, I learnt how to put stickers on my gifs haha)



The floor looks kinda cool, but I only wanted the sinewavey highlight to appear on the grid in the background. The floor is just a grid and then transparent pixels.

I wanted something more like this...



The problem here is that the rest of the background has been cutout. After lots of banging my head I consulted a friend (Tom @ Big Robot) about how they would approach it, he suggested using multiple textures and other things that were a bit tricky for me to do easily.
Unity works with sprites in a bit of an odd way, if you're set up like me (well not odd, but a bit of a hassle). If you use the standard shader to render your sprites, and you use multiple textures, the second texture needs to match the tiles of the first. So I would have to have another tilemap that would overlay on to my existing one. The pipeline for creating this would be a pain, so I wanted to do this all in-shader.
So Tom suggested that as my construct world would be all green, I could use another colour channel to denote where I wanted the effect to occur. This worked great!



I need to work on the textures and the blend of how much effect to show, but I'm happy for this first experiment.

Lastly, I've been working on hooking up some reworked maps in to the game. Here's the new hideout. There was a lot of wasted space in the original, I wanted to make it feel smaller and more cluttered.



Going to the EGX show in Birmingham, UK on thursday to show a build to some folks there, so will be preparing for that most of the week

This is looking really good!

I know you're already overwhelmed, but the detailed real-world, combined with dynamic lighting, really makes the plain green grid of cyberspace rather lackluster. Adding the car/shipping crate in with the damage flashes was a nice touch, though.

I'll try to keep an eye on this one!

Thanks!

The battles will actually have proper backgrounds. I've just not been able to get them in game yet. Depending on how it works out, I might have some props in the background too. I need to experiment with that and work out the best way to swap different props in and out, and then see if it actually looks good or not.

Thanks for the feedback though, I'll think of some more ways I can make the battles look a bit more interesting!

Last night I got annoyed by my terrible water tiles, so went an made a quick shader to do a bit of texture warp on the tiles, to save me actually having to animate them by hand. Modifying the Unity standard shader is a right pain, but I eventually got it working. It consists of a simple sin warp and then wrapping the uv values so that they stay inside the tile bounds. It's super simple, but as I only touch shaders about once ever six months I find myself having to relearn everything over again. So this was a nice little challenge for me

(It's a bit harder to see when it's not better lit)

Hey folks,

Last week or so has been all about building more UI! Hooray, everybody's favourite!

My main focus has been on building the shop systems, so you can now buy items, software and hardware. It's mostly done, but needs a bunch more testing to make sure' I've not missed any edge cases as there a ton of different conditions on whether an item is purchasable or not.I still need to tweak some of the text to make things a little more obvious too.

I've been following the maps progress on Twitter, they are looking really great!

This game looks incredibly awesome. Great art direction. I have to ask, how many times did you have to change your art direction before you reached this one? 

Hey. Thanks! Code-wise the game has been through a ton of iterations, starting with ImpactJS, XNA and then finally Unity once the 2D stuff came out. The art has reflected those changes too. But since moving to Unity it's only really been through two iterations, the original 2 colour backgrounds that didn't really work (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1007983#msg1007983) and then the move to the 3D-forced-perspective look (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1111787#msg1111787).

The 3D-forced-perspective look has had a couple of iterations, but only in terms of content. Once I got it working it's pretty much looked the same and I've just incrementally improved my process and lighting techniques etc. For example, rather than using single sprites for objects now, I'll often split them into a front face and a top face, which allows them to be lit better.

You can see how levels are built in this post: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1185230#msg1185230
It also links to the Unite talk by Sebastien Dubois about the technique they used on Dungeon of the Endless that I stole/borrowed for Jack Move. Once I saw this I knew it would be perfect for what I had in mind. I think I've managed to expand and improve on it in my own way to make it unique enough

Hope that explains things

Thanks RadicalBradical! :D (Great username there )

I never get tired of cyberpunk games. This looks great! Just a question. Probably someone asked before on this thread but, which game engine do you use?

Thanks Jack Move is built in Unity.

Hey there!

Been working on some new environments over the past week. Sadly I've been a bit ill too, so not got as much done as I'd have liked.

Here is Deck Lord, the electronics and hacking store and den:



And here's Monomart, the local convenience store for all your health/regen needs:



I've been trying to get faster at creating maps, both of these took around one day each.

You might also notice (although maybe not) that I've swapped out the effects stack for Unity's new post processing stack. Specifically the beta of version 2 stack as this fixes an issue I was having where the bloom filter would flash and blink when turned up even a tiny bit.
I also just discovered ambient occlusion, which looks pretty good, give everything just a little more depth. I'm not sure if I'll keep it, as the effect flickers a little when small objects are close together, perhaps this is a small price to pay for a general overall improvement though.

Till next time

come a long way man, and looking great! :D

That battle transition looks sweet! I also really like the color palette on the combat view - the character sprites contrast nicely against 80's hacker grid.

Thanks! Means a lot

Hey folks, been a while!

I've mostly spent the last few weeks working on pitch and budget stuff, which has been fun, if not a challenge as they're not my strongest skills.

I've also been working on a lot of small fixes and improvements, a battle simple tutorial (as promised!) and making cutscene skippable.

A nice little touch I've added is a slight scroll-in when battles start (after Joe suggested it). It's quite subtle, but gives the battle a bit more depth:



Other small things I've worked on include adding a button prompt to dialog boxes, making all the air-con units more 3d (rather than a flat sprite) and general tweaks to maps and lighting and things.

The next big thing was the battle tutorial. This is pretty simple and just presents the player with a bunch of dialogs to explain things. I might revisit this at some point to include a turn by turn tutorial but that would involve some battle code refactoring that I don't have time for at the moment. I'm hoping this should be enough.







Lastly I worked on skipping cutscenes, this wasn't as tricky as I had thought, but will mean a bit more content work in the future.

Cutscenes a comprised of a list of frames, and each frame has a list of actions, these are stored as just a hierarchy of game objects. The cutscene controller steps through each frame, plays all of that frames actions, waits for them to complete and then steps to the next frame. Skipping a cutscene halfway through could leave things in a weird state if control was handed back to the player immediately.

The first thing I did was add a "cancel cutscene" hook to each action that would require it. Then I added a second list of frames and a little bit of scripting to put the original frames under their own object so we're not mixing normal frames and skip frames together. Now when the cutscene is canceled we fade out and run the skip frames, then fade back in. Super simple! The end result is that anything like a moving character can have it's action cancelled, and a skip frame and accompanying action that sets the character to it's final position and sets the correct (usual idle) animation, so everything is set up for control to be handed back to the player.

This might sound super simple, and the initial implementation was. However, things like dialogs and UI dependant actions caused a lot more pain than I was expecting. Luckily this was a good time to tidy up some of that code

That's about it. Till next time...

Hey folks,

Been a hectic couple of weeks, what with Develop etc. But slowly getting back into the swing of development.

Did some playtesting and bits so I've been fixing some of the issue that have come up from feedback.

Firstly, I've added input device independent icons to a bunch of dialog to make tutorials a bit easier to understand:





I used the excellent TextPic in the UI-Extensions project https://bitbucket.org/UnityUIExtensions/unity-ui-extensions/wiki/Controls/TextPic. I had to change a bunch of stuff to get it to swap out images at runtime, but it seems to be working well

I also added a context sensitive thing to show what inputs are available. At some point I'll add an option to turn this on or off.



Lastly, people were having trouble understanding what they needed to do. Lot's of people just skip past any dialog stuff and then miss what their goal is. So I added a little objective system that tells you exactly what you need to do. It pops up a little thing when you receive the objective, and they are all viewable in the menu too.





This next week I'll be concentrating on making a tutorial for the battles, hopefully this will be quite simple. I'd really rather not over tutorialise things, but if I can reduce the friction some players are encountering then it will be better for everyone

Till next time, x

Thanks everyone

Wow! great work, really dig the overall aesthetic. The music in the trailers is really well done as well. Whos the composer for that one?

The music for the trailer is by Fracture, who I'm pleased to say will be doing all the music for the game

Hey champs!

Been busy working on getting Jack Move ready to show to people during the Develop conference next week (as well as organising the Games by the Sea party), it's been a super busy couple of weeks of getting the last bits of art in to the demo, fixing bugs and making a new trailer...





Also, I finally got round to updating the first post of this thread

Very cool! I really like the art style, again. It all seems to be coming together well.

Cache sounds like a nice ability that has a few strategic uses, so good work on that front, too.

Thanks!

I was thinking that in regards to your NPC animations, you might be able to get more bang for your buck, so to speak, by having the NPCs be less "static". Like, less frames of animation with more interesting poses > more frames of animation in less interesting poses. Having characters seated, leaning against the wall, crouching, playing with objects - you could add more to the atmosphere with characters, even with fewer actual animation frames, rather than having a larger number of characters with more frames all moving in the same way (bobbing up and down).

Thanks for the feedback, that's really useful. I think once we get more time we'll revisit these animations to give them a bit more character. For the moment I just wanted to get something in the game that's not just a single static frame but wouldn't take a huge amount of time to produce. Bobbing up and down is a lot easier than an idle with a complicated pose or more subtle animation.

For example, as Uncle Guin is a main character I chose to put more effort into getting him animated. His animations are much more naturalistic, no bobbing up and down, smoking a cigarette, swirling his drink etc. I hope to bring this level of animation to all the npcs in the future, sadly I just don't have the budget at the moment.



Cheers!

Hey everyone,

I've been super busy over the last couple of week, both with the game and organising an event that I run called Games by the Sea. It's a fun party with drinks and multiplayer/party games, held each year whilst the Develop conference is on in my home town of Brighton. So if you're attending Develop, you should come along! We have a bunch of free tickets, with the next batch going up on Friday!

As for Jack Move, lots has been going on. I've got a ton of new npc and player animations from Gary and Joe. The world is starting to feel a bit more alive with all these npcs.

On the code side of things, I made a neat little cutscene action so that you can give an actor a target and they will face the correct direction, ie, have the correct idle or talking animation play. This has also been added to the Dialog action, which means I don't really have to manually set the talk and post-dialog idle each time unless it specifically needs it.





I've tweaked a ton of stuff like battle timing and screenshake amounts. These things (especially screenshake) could be tweaked forever, so I'll have to stop at some point. I've also been implementing tweaks and fixes from a bunch of feedback I've got after I sent out a build a couple of weeks ago. Some of this is pretty mundane like spelling mistakes and things not getting triggered correctly in cutscenes. But other stuff has had a major impact on the game, my favourite being the Cache move that is available in battle...

Previously the Cache move acted as a basic defend. Once activated you would take 25% (with a random chance of 30%) less damage. However, some feedback that I got was that it was quite difficult to balance changing up your loadout (more about loadout and software in this previous post) and not getting massacred by enemies. This is something that I've actually been thinking about for a long time. With only one party member it can be quite difficult to time your loadout swap if you don't also have enough ram to keep your regenerative software. The playtesters suggestion was that Cache should do as it's name suggests (and what they expected in the first place) and delay you current turn so that next time you get two turns in a row.
I thought it was going to be super hard to implement in my battle engine, but turns out it only took twenty minutes :D The outcome is actually really good, with a nice bit of risk and reward. Using the turn order list you can time when you want to Cache, usually when only one or two enemies will attack between now and your next turn, you still take the damage but are still defending so you'll take a bit less. Then next turn, you can swap out your software and use it within what is essentially one go, with no wait in between.



Not sure if that's a great description, but it definitely solves the problem :D

Still more tweaks and fixing to do this week, onwards and upwards!

Hey folks,

Not a whole lot to show this week. I've mostly been fixing bugs and getting a build ready to send to some friends. It's gotten to the point where I think it's getting good, but need some more eyeballs on it!

This morning I worked up a quick flash effect. I wanted some way to add a bit more impact to damage hits and things.

The first version was a bit intense:



This version using just a screen border is much nicer, although the amount of flashes and colour needs to be experimented with



Cheers!