I'm still not a huge fan of the music, but it is indeed... less unpleasant with other sounds and with visual elements to subdue it a little, I think.

Well, this is going to bother me now! I'm going to iterate on this and see if I can find a sound that is grating/uncomfortable, but not so much that Thaumaturge disapproves

As to the block, I might suggest adding a little bit more movement that's not along the player's forward axis--that might make the response read a little more clearly, I think.

Yeah, agreed, probably needs a bit of downward movement to be more believable.

If anything I think you'll actually find the flashlight glitching SFX more annoying

Joy.

K, I scaled it way back, hopefully you won't even notice now!

Here's a quick video showing how combat has been progressing lately, plus some recent additions:

• added SFX and subtle animation when shielding
• now emitting particles on shield impact
• added damage SFX for player (in addition to vocalization)
• added "death" SFX for rats
• beefed up the enemy damage SFX with multiple layers of gory goodness

I also spent some time smoothing movement:

• I'm now running camera positioning code in LateUpdate vs FixedUpdate (I'm currently running physics a bit slower than Unity default due to all the rigidbodies, and it was becoming noticeably choppy to move the camera in here)
• added some smoothing for head/jump bob (previously, there were some cases where it would jump back to the default position--I'm now doing smooth damping to minimize this)

You can also hear the "terror" music in the video. Let me know what you think/if you still feel it's too grating with everything else going on!

Hmm... In that first video, I find the noises rather less grating to hear, I believe. The last few are pushing it a bit for me, but still preferable.

That second audio clip I really don't like. I do think that what you've done is preferable to that, at least!

I think that the second clip and the "glitchiness" in your piece both tend a little too close to that "nails on a chalkboard" sound for my liking.

Interesting. I hear it a bit differently, but I respect your opinion.

I'll share some in-game audio/video at some point. With the dynamic filtering, background ambience, other SFX, etc. the glitchy stuff actually blends into the background quite a bit.

If anything I think you'll actually find the flashlight glitching SFX more annoying

And yeah, that's the "glitchiness" I'm talking about. The idea is to create unease/tension, so I guess it's working as expected ("Amnesia" had teeth grating sounds, for example, which was unnerving but great!)

Hmm... I see what you mean, but I don't think that this element did work as intended for me: I don't think it made me uneasy or tense in the way that you intend--instead, I think that I found it annoying to listen to. That is, I found it to not be unpleasant as in "this is a horror game; I'm uneasy", but rather as in "I dislike this element of the music".

Still, I see what you're going for; perhaps this approach just isn't for me, personally.

This music only plays while being chased by, or in combat with, the strong enemies. The rest of the time there's more subdued dark ambient music playing, interspersed with moments of silence.

Ah, that does help a little, I do think!

I'll get a few more opinions and consider scaling it back if the popular opinion is the same as yours, although I definitely want at least a few little grating bits in there... can't have people getting too comfortable.

Fair enough! But note that there is, I think, a difference between an element that conveys an unpleasant situation, and an element that makes the experience itself unpleasant.

Fair points! I can respect that it's not for everyone, and that it may even make the experience unpleasant for some, although I would also argue that there's a large element of subjectivity to this as well.

Just as a bit of a (in)sanity check: how do you feel about this?




And how do you feel about it playing on top of something like this?






Amnesia is one of my influences for the sound design, and (objectively, I think?) I would say that what I've done so far is much more subdued/less grating.

That sounds pretty good to me, I think! There's a nice tension to it, understated in the first section (which I presume is the "drone"), and more intense in the section that's layered over it layer (which I presume is the "rhythm"). And the dynamic aspects that you describe seem like a neat touch. ^_^

My only critique is that there's a sort of high-pitched "scratching" sound throughout the piece that I find somewhat grating; I don't think that I'd like to hear that constantly while playing... :/

Thanks! And yeah, that's the "glitchiness" I'm talking about. The idea is to create unease/tension, so I guess it's working as expected ("Amnesia" had teeth grating sounds, for example, which was unnerving but great!)

This music only plays while being chased by, or in combat with, the strong enemies. The rest of the time there's more subdued dark ambient music playing, interspersed with moments of silence.

I'll get a few more opinions and consider scaling it back if the popular opinion is the same as yours, although I definitely want at least a few little grating bits in there... can't have people getting too comfortable.

Something else I worked on over the weekend: a second pass over the "terror drone"
https://soundcloud.com/snugsound/toxicant-terror-drone

I made the whole thing a bit less abrasive, added a second "phase" to the progression, increased side chain (esp for the glitchiness), reduced the frequency of the kick, and added some variation in the rhythm.

In-game, this is split into two layers (drones/glitch, and rhythm), with the rhythm kicking in when "terrorized" for an extended period. I also have the drones dynamically low-passed, and the rhythm dynamically hi-passed, based on a "stress" parameter in FMOD--simple but effective, I'd say:



The very first iteration, for comparison:
https://soundcloud.com/snugsound/terror-drone

And perhaps with a bit of parameterisation you might still be able to distinguish the axe and plank from each other, while nevertheless having them use the same code.

One suggestion--that you may well already have in mind, but that seems worth mentioning just in case--is that the defence-state could perhaps use some feedback when blocking a hit: spark- or dust- particles being emitted, and perhaps an animation of the weapon being knocked about by the force of the impact.

Agreed on both! There's some screenshake when actively blocking but it definitely needs more weight/feel to it.

please read an article about videogame graffiti

It's supposed to be a bit campy, but thanks for coming out

Finally getting around to prototyping this idea I had for a "dark altar", where you'll be able to exchange luck for a random buff or some such

Well, good progress yesterday. I put some serious time into refactoring melee animations and logic, as they was a bit scattered before:

• The pickaxe and plank had vastly different setups, I've now got them sharing the same animation and much of the same code (for better for worse: I don't know that one would swing these things in the same manner, but it's definitely better for prototyping/iterating!)
• The shared "swing" animation is now much faster, and although it still looks a bit "artificial", it's better than what it was previously
• I gave the plank much more realistic dimensions--still bigger than a 2x4, but not like the ginormous slab of wood it was before
• I've also started experimenting with a shield option for melee weapons in the hopes of introducing a bit more diversity in combat and also giving the player some recourse from the aggressive and unpredictable attacks of the mutant miners

It looks suitably retro, I think. ^_^

(Although I do feel that some elements of the UI--such as those audio prompts at the sides of the screen--now look jarringly modern by comparison.)

Thanks! And agreed, I'll have to do something about--probably just drop the resolution a bit and maybe point-scale as well. (as long as it doesn't sacrifice readability/usability)

Still a heavy WIP, but here are some better shots of the "retrofied" visuals

Phew, almost ready to roll on the Steam store page rebrand.



(I'll probably leave the trailer as-is for now and just put a temporary blurb in the description referencing the change)

Edit: rebranded Steam store page is live!

[Unity 2018.3 upgrade]

Unity 2018.3 upgrade
Well, I bit the bullet and upgraded to 2018.3, mostly for nested prefabs. It took a couple of attempts and a few hours, but I'd say it was worth it. The biggest pain point was going from the asset store versions of TMP and ProBuilder to the package versions, but both are fairly well-documented and have upgrade utilities. I still haven't upgraded to Post Processing Stack v2, but I'll probably leave this for later as there's nothing I need from it at the moment.

I've already used nested prefabs a few dozen times and I'm expecting this will make things a whole lot more manageable going forward.

Optimization, build time reduction
With the help of Better Build Info ($10 on the asset store, not bad!) I was able to strip some more unused assets out of the repo. I'm now down to a 2.5 GB repo, a ~550 MB build, and a 7 minute build time.



I've also identified a few more performance bottlenecks (namely, methods that are generating lots of garbage). I still haven't found a solution for these yet, but at least I have a better handle on them. The worst offender is actually my own doing: the mini-map. The other is a third-party asset I'm using for dynamic culling.

Ghosts
Something I was experimenting with in the "industrial chasm" level proof of concept a while ago was these sort of floating skulls that charge you in the dark (or when you're looking away), but recoil when you hit them with your flashlight. (yes, they're definitely Mario inspired )

I've introduced these to the main game to add some diversity.





Improved Attacking
My initial implementation of melee attacking left a lot to be desired: the weapon never felt like it landed a direct hit, and the hit box collider was attached to the (animated) gameobject. Not really sure what I was thinking, as this lead to all sorts of issues, like accidentally hitting the ceiling when in a tunnel, or easily missing an enemy that was dead center.

Anyway, I've tuned the animations and switched to a traditional hit box approach. It feels much, much better.



Spawn Pools
Another issue I was running into before the break was that many prefabs managed their own spawning, i.e. the prefab would have a component with a list of hard-coded prefabs to spawn. This resulted in "global" changes being difficult to achieve.

To deal with this I've implemented "SpawnPools": scriptable objects that I can use to define a pool of prefabs to pick from. So now instead of hard-coding the list in the spawning object, I just give it the ID of the pool. This will make life a hell of a lot easier when I start introducing more dynamic probability, luck, etc., because now this can all be centrally managed.

Freeze Beacons
Something else I was experimenting with before the break: different types of beacons. The most practical one for evasion being the "freeze beacon", which temporarily slows any (organic) enemies it comes in contact with.

I can see this becoming a critical item for the later levels, when the number of enemies really ratchets up.





Name Change
Last but not least, I unfortunately have to rename/rebrand the game! It turns out there was another team working on a game with the same name for about as long, and they are closer to release than I am. A bit of a setback, especially after my recently renewed enthusiasm, but I hope to get through it quickly, and get back to work!

Tentative new name: Toxicant. I think it accurately depicts the scenario, is fairly unique, and fits nicely in the vein of campy one-word horror movie titles. It's also an opportunity to introduce some toxic green.



P.S. Apologies for the graininess of the GIFs, I'm still trying to find the right tool/encoding options to balance file size with quality while also maintaining the dark-yet-also-HDR visuals of the game! I'll post some video soon too, I swear!

It sounds like you've done some solid work there. I hope that the changes that you're making to your organisational approach prove very helpful to you! ^_^

Thanks, Thaumaturge! Organization is my middle name. I used to get beat up for it...

And thanks for the support! You're like a mainstay of TIGForums devlogs.

Well, I'm more or less back at it. It just kinda happened. I'll keep rolling with it and see where it goes!

There's already a store page on Steam, users with the game on their wishlist, etc. and I'd really like to capitalize on this. I'm hoping to tighten up the scope to a point that I can deliver something within 3 months, as I've done with my past few games. (well, Brainmelter Deluxe took more like 6, but I'm not counting the 3 months of procrastination...)

I think it will also make a good addition to my Cosmocat Complete bundle, as it will then include an action platformer, a casual space exploration game, a hardcore platformer, and a roguelite survival horror. That's a pretty diverse range of games, I'd say!

Anyway, so far I've been able to bring the repository size way down--from 6GB to 2.6GB. Part of this was removing unused assets, the other part was stripping out details, reducing texture sizes, etc. I still have a ways to go: there are still many 4K textures (including some heavy PSD files), and likely unused assets I haven't found yet. To that end, I'm looking into tools that will help me find unused assets, as so far it's mostly been tedious manual searching.

Lately, I've been turning my attention to the project organization. In addition to the problem of having "too much detail", this is also something that was making the project overwhelming to work on.

I've started by organizing and cataloging all the prefabs used in the procedural generation. This is currently sitting at around 100. That's not a huge number, but it's definitely something I want to rein in, as there are many objects duplicated between prefabs resulting in a hassle (or mistakes) whenever I want to make "global" changes. (I'm not using a version of Unity with supported for nested prefabs--yet)



(I know, I know... not very exciting stuff, but it's a necessary step...)

Now that I have a solid index, I will look for ways to optimize these. A lot of my level geometry is done with ProBuilder, and it doesn't really have a clean way to share meshes between prefabs, so for meshes that are commonly used I'm going to convert these to FBX. I'm also going to see if I can "collapse" some prefabs so they're a bit more encapsulated. For example, rather having separate prefabs for "room" and "flooded room", the logic to handling flooded could be built into the one prefab, or this could be handled through additive scene loading, which may even give me some crude form of nested prefabs.

I hope to get through this cleanup in a few days, so stay tuned for some dev build footage shortly thereafter!

If/when I get back to Undermine (hopefully "when"!), I'm thinking of "downgrading" the graphics a bit. Nothing too retro, but just trying to get away from the insane level of detail that was there before (high-res textures, heavy shaders, lots of details maps, etc.).

I spent the better part of yesterday doing an experiment/proof of concept...



The above was done using a shader with a single albedo texture input, and point-sampled (pixelated) textures no bigger than 256x256! It actually doesn't even look all that retro, but if you get up close to things there's a bit of lo-fi grit/charm from the point-sampled textures.

My rationale is that by taking all this extra detail out of the equation, I can focus more of my time on adding content/gameplay. It also brings the build time way down (this was a massive problem before because of the "uber shaders") and results in a much smaller game with lower system requirements.

This approach is definitely rekindling my desire to pick it back up, especially since I have so much time invested in it already, and I've gotten pretty good at "finishing things" in the past 10 months (Cosmic Ray, Brainmelter Deluxe).

I'm working on a few content updates for Cosmic Ray, kicking off with:

• *New enemy type!* Insanely creative working name: "space blob". These guys build up energy as you shoot them, which charges up their deflection attack. Eventually, they totally discharge and "rest" for a while. (pictured below)
• *Enemy ship fire patterns*: rather than firing continuously, there are now gaps. This makes evasion a little bit easier/predictable.
• *New main laser SFX*: less "piercing" sound, with some variations (you can still toggle between other SFX using up/down on keyboard or D-pad, but there is no variation in these).

These changes currently in the preview branch on Steam, pending a bit more testing (and refreshing of marketing before promoting it to the main branch.

Well, the game is released, but that's not going to stop me from continuing to work on it. I like to think the release is just the begininng, not the end!

So in the interest of making the game more visually appealing, and hopefully more marketable, I spent some time overhauling the visuals. Specifically:

• all levels now have proper floor tile details
• the main and transition levels have some extra background details
• background fan blades are now animated (not pictured)
• spinning objects now have a little "anchor" point (rather than just fading to nothing)

Here's how that's shaping up:




It's currently in the preview branch on Steam, pending a bit more testing (and refreshing of marketing assets) before promoting it to the main branch.

Phew, well it's done! I pressed the button to make it live yesterday.





In the end, I stopped posting updates here in favour of using my Discord as a quasi-devlog, since it was generally getting more interaction/engagement. I'll probably do the same for my next game, but hey, if you're reading this and interested in what I'm doing, drop a quick line

Onwards and upwards!
Adam/Cosmocat