Love how evocative and expressive your characters look, and love how scenes with trees and foliage seem to breathe. Very cool! The cat and the cat's tail's seriously full of personality!

Thank you very much! ^_^
I'm still not satisfied with some of the characters. I've got a whole animation rework in the pipeline. I want to make special animations for each expression or dialogue. As well as voice sync their lips with the voice acting later.

love the cats tail, really great idea.

the cat holding the lantern looks very weird, as it it was showing its teeth? the lamp should be held by its mouth I assume, so the mouth would be closed.

The teeth is just a generic frame for carrying anything. I fixed the pivot point on the lamp so now it looks like its holding it by its handle correctly.

Cheers!

Seriously that looks and a ton of fun! I'd love to hear the soundtrack and audio for it!

This looks really interesting. I love how you are using the art as textures. Gives it a really unique look.

That's an interesting effect. Is your light effectively bringing out a normal map and/or texture in the background that's completely invisible in the absence of light otherwise? Or what is that thing behind the cat? What exactly is going on here?

Nothing fancy at all! This is how it actually looks:

Just a regular mesh plane with a bump texture, with a spot light shining on it.

I just added the mesh resulting from the ray trace with a semi-transparent white texture.

Inspired by the work of Prinsessa in her thread Vatnsmyrkr - sad SUBMARINE exploration (NOW: "3D" water), I decided to try my hand at creating a dynamic light cone that casts real-time shadows.

Here's my attempt at setup up the ray trace burst to collect coordinates for my vertices. I'm using 80 rays here:


And here's my first ever dynamic light cone!


And here it is in action in glorious wide camera shot.


Now I need to figure out how to texture it!

I added a little puzzle involving a furnace. The furnace features two particles one in front for the fumes coming out of the grill, and another one behind the exhaust piping to convey volume and shape. Attached to it is a local light that illuminates the immediate surroundings. The light is animated to convey that it is being emitted from the flames. Like was, the interior of the furnace is also attached to it and brightens in sync with the light. 


Here I added the assets involved in the puzzle. The wheelbarrow in the back, a lighter, and a log.


Solving the puzzle activates another set of assets tied to an event later down the line. I like how the floor grill shadows animate. There's two layers of shadow to convey depth. The lighting is unrealistic, but it's there for effect.


I keep a log of everything worked on. Here what was done on that particular day.

Wow! (O_O)
It's fantastic! :-)
Keep up the good work. d(^_^)b

Thanks a lot!

Looks amazing!
What's the animation tool?

Inkscape, it's traditional handmade/drawn 2D animation for the cat. The tail was later redone in 3D Studio MAX, but outputted as a sprite sheet. The other NPC's are bone based sprites that are hand key framed in Unity3D.

I hope that answers you question?

UPDATE 3

All right, it's 3 AM and I think I'll be giving up for tonight. I refactored my test light code from the submarine's file into an actual system and so I can now add as many functioning light sources as I want. They still work like before – we'll have to see what happens there eventually.



Also, these tiny window sizes from all the previous images aren't going to be the actual viewport. I'm just keeping it small for testing. The game won't be that claustrophobic. This is the normal space around the submarine at the standard 1920x1080 resolution intended:



The camera is going to be slightly dynamic, tho, adjusting for specific areas, sometimes zooming in, sometimes out.

Down the line, do you see it possible to make the edges of the light soft and blurred?

Dude, your game just oozes style and personality. Really love the art work and animation. I've always wondered how those destructible environments were done, very you've explained how that is done. Keep up the awesome work.

Yours seems a little darker and grimmer than this one. Maybe yours is a combination of my two games?

Thanks! <3

Actually yours is the combination of both our games since you have a lot more advanced systems and features than mine.

I thought you'd تتكلم اللغة العربية?

بالعكس, أتكلمها. ولكن تفاجأت بأن أحدا هنا يتكلمها أيضا.

Are we working on the same project?

It's really nice to see a very similar project and how others tackle the same issues with different solutions. Also very informative as you explain nicely. Lots to learn from you.

Been watching this before, but forgot about it. Still looks amazing. *-*

  بالتوفيق

بالتوفيق؟ o_O

Thanks for passing by. 

For screen shot Saturday!

A dirty part of the map gets a nice upgrade with better lighting, more elements, more depth, and trash bags!
In this area, the interior of a large trash bin, you can dig in the dirt, and hopefully a useful random item will pop out! lol


Who turned off the lights? I really like the ambiance in this picture, everyone staring at the motionless disco ball:


The house's directional light map. This greatly enhances the ambiance and mood of the locations. The game has two maps. One dictates the color, the other how and where the light fall on characters. It's a great thing to fiddle with and watch how lighting changes in game.


And finally, a simply improvement in code greatly increase the smoothness as you walk over an uneven surface. This has been bothering me since I implemented object rotation on surface. Yesterday I finally got around to work on ironing it out.

For screen shot Saturday!

A dirty part of the map gets a nice upgrade with better lighting, more elements, more depth, and trash bags!


Who turned off the lights?


The house's directional light map. This greatly enhances the ambiance and mood of the locations:


And finally, a simply improvement in code greatly increase the smoothness as you walk over an uneven surface:

While we wait around kicking our feet I thought I'd share some progress shots. Here's a shot from the corner of the secret underground passage. I don't know if you can call it progress as much as you can call it just a change in art style. Still, learning how to do lights on on backgrounds with bump/normal maps was the prime reason this area of the map got the darkness treatment:


Here's the Rat's den in the basement. You can clearly see just how low the resolution was in the original version! Fundamentally, this place hasn't changed much. The rat still hoards items here and bargains for them. Hehe!


Also, doors are pretty neat to work with now. Without coding, I can now specify where doors lead to, if they are locked or not, and which key opens them. In addition to how they sound when opened or unlocked:


Cheerio!

One thing I've been dying to include in my game from the very beginning were animated avatars for the dialogue interface. While the avatars were of a good quality, I still felt ashamed of its lack of animation considering games even during the 16-bit era of gaming had the mouths at least move.



The problem with animating them was creating the multiple hand-drawn frames for them. A daunting task considering the art style didn't feature solid color shading. After all, each portrait took at least half a day to draw and paint. And even if I drew the needed frames, there would be no flexibility in animating them, and the frame rate wouldn't fit with the fluid art-style of the game.

So here's what I did to work around the problem. I converted the sprite based avatars into 3D meshes:


I then constructed the edges and vertices of the polygons to follow the features and creases of the characters avatar. That way I can manipulate the vertices of the mesh and it would stretch along their natural lines:



I then make multiple copies of the mesh, and assign them as morph targets. That will allow me to apply them as individual weights. So I make a copy for individual elements of expression. The eye brow, the blinking, a smile, a nod, a frown, an opened move pronouncing a certain vowel, etc:


And here's a few of the final results. Not too shabby! And each one takes 2-3 hours to make, and after that I can animate them in the engine to my hearts content!

My new animated title screen:


I really liked this accidental pause frame:


Psycho sis playing around the game world menacing you: