//edit: Issue in action:

This kind of problem does seem familiar. I have seen this kind of thing before. One thing I'd be suspect on is the wall mesh casting shadows onto itself. With the extruded wall segments that jut out from the wall, are those separate meshes or are they part of the same wall mesh? what I'm wondering is if the shadow calculations are getting confused about how to cast shadows on itself. If they are try separating those out on their own. You could also think about disabling receive shadows on just those walls, it obviously depends on how you want them to appear but there's a chance they don't even need shadows and the look you're after can be faked (just for the flat walls, not the parts that jut out).

To kick off the conversation I've been hoping to ask you all a few questions to the PC gamers.

* what's you're preferred game controller on PC?

* do you often customize your controller button mappings and hate it when games don't allow this? we at the very minimum will offer being able to invert the y axis for cursor movement and adjust the cursor speed.

* our game is only suitable for a single screen experience, do you game with a multi-screen setup? and what should we do with it... simply leave your poor second monitor alone??

[Agent A]

Hi there TIG community  

I'm Jason from Yak & Co, one half of the core team creating Agent A. I introduced a little about myself over in the intro thread, bore yourself check out some of my fave games of all time .

We wanted to open up a conversation with you all across many topics regarding our upcoming releases, and it would be really great to receive any feedback from you, particularly regarding our PC release for Steam.

For those that don't know about Agent A, it's an episodic spy themed puzzle adventure game, your mission (should you choose to accept) is to infiltrate enemy spy Ruby La Rouge’s secret hideaway and put a stop to her evil plans! Chapters 1-4 of a planned 5 are out now on mobile, but the complete tale of espionage (including the fifth and final chapter) will be arriving early 2019 for the first time on: Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Mac App Store as well as the final chapter for iOS, Google Play & Amazon.

If anyone would like to know more about the creation of Agent A as well feel free to ask, we'd be more than happy to share technical details on our solutions and tools.  

For more info and to find out exactly when Agent A is going to drop, subscribe to our newsletter over at agentagame.com... Oh and Agent, don't forget to add us to your wishlist on our Steam coming soon page.


Check out the announcement trailer (created by the amazing Derek Lieu):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0LpDTT0kAA&feature=youtu.be

Sounds interesting James. I've got an issue logging in to WeChat at the moment since I've changed countries and got a new phone, but when I can I'll try and add you.

Hey there, do you use Unity as your game engine? if yes then they provide a plugin that helps with making your app compliant.

Facebook Gameroom is probably worth mentioning too. I've not had any experience using it. I have used Kongregate years ago for a JS/HTML5 based game which was simple enough. But it was a free game. It seems to me that this market is fairly hard to monetize.

Hey there, what platform are you planning to publish to because Deferred may not be an option on mobile. I think Unity have recently added deferred to mobile platforms, but for the longest time it's not been an option. Many people have been mistaken thinking that deferred is used but if you actually check the rendering pipeline at runtime (even with deferred selected) you'll find it's using forward on mobile. The new Lightweight rendering pipeline though is supposedly going to give mobile the ability to use more than one pixel light but still is not a deferred renderer.

As for shadow quality, you're going to get better shadow quality results if the shadow distance is as small as possible. I know this might not work out for scene that you're lighting but try and set the shadow distance to something low like 10-20 and see how it appears. With shadow distance think of it like the shadows are texture map of set resolution, the higher the shadow distance value the further this texture map is getting stretched and therefore the pixels of the shadow map increase in size (decreasing the quality and appearance).

Hi there TIG community 

It's Jason Rawlings here, one half of the indie studio Yak & Co (creators of Agent A: A puzzle in disguise). Nice to meet you all 

I've been working with Mark White (our artist) for many years, five and half on Agent A. I'm the code guy I've been programming for 15 years building many many games over the years, Agent A is by far the biggest project I've worked on however. Growing up I was in love with games of all sorts, NES was my first console but got my first taste of games on Atari and Arcade. I got lost in PC games all through the 90's and kept up with console games ever since as well. Some of my fave games of all time:

Super Mario World
Day of the Tentacle / Maniac Mansion (and everything lucasarts)
XCOM
Zelda
Dune II
Mass Effect series
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest
Uncharted
Jak & Daxter

That's a bit about me =) We joined up as we'd love to get in touch with the community and let you know more about what we're planning as we bring Agent A to Steam, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. But not just spamming you one way, we would really love to open up some conversations with you all and find out what's important to you before we wrap up these new platforms, things like what's your favourite PC game controller, do you hate it when PC games forget to do X?? or just learn about what your favourite adventure game of all time is haha. Enough from me. See you around the forums.

Jason (Yak & Co)