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[OniWorld]

DevLog update #4
It's been almost 2 weeks since our last update, but not to worry - we've been busy! Lloyd has been hard at work on drawing nearly 100 assets for me to play with. I've also been looking into and working on finally animating Klank. I've been mainly optimizing and bug fixing, as well as working on the editor again. Also, I figured I'd give you guys something to play with. So here's that fluid example I was working on a few posts back:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gyrrzhyr1qo3c55/OniExample.air

NOTE: You need Adobe Air to run it, klank's story will be in a native format though. Any advice/feedback on the feel/control is appreciated. Controls:

• Arrow left - Move left
• Arrow right - Move right
• Arrow up - Jump
• I - Spawn in a girder thingy
• O - Spawn in a warden head
• P - Pause

In the meantime, I leave you with this... got a light?

[OniWorld]

DevLog update #5
In the last short development update, we mentioned that we were working on optimising the engine. One of these optimisations was the lighting engine. I haven't shown much of the lighting engine yet, but it was already pretty cool. The only issue however was the fact that it used the the display list and blend modes, which was alright but wasn't the most efficient. We also had to create light textures and store them as PNGs instead of dynamically generating them, but now all that has changed.

Last night I started work on a deferred rendering pipeline using AGAL. This means our lighting engine is much faster, more efficient and runs entirely on the GPU. We can do all sorts of fancy effects all combined into one shader, instead of using different render targets and filters which we were doing previously. It's now possible for us to add normal/bump mapping, specular lighting and loads more - including god rays and HDR effects. Here's a scene with and without lighting:

No lighting

With lighting

But there's still something missing. I've also been working on atmospheric effects. It's a subtle change, but it can make a massive difference to a scene:

 

[Calined]

ooooh! =D
this is looking great!
the lighting makes a whole lot of difference!
(and i am impressed by how much stuff you program.. like that curves thingy o_o)
so far it reminds me of Machinarium, but less scribbly and more "finished/smooth"! =)

[Music Vortex]

Lots of progress here!
It's looking great, I really like the last picture, great environment there!

[OniWorld]

Mailing list
Lately we've been getting ready to set an animator loose on the Klank sprite and get some basic animations created. Standard animations like running, climbing, doing the hustle, everything you'd need a playable sprite to have. Hopefully, we'll be able to share some of that with you in the next week or two. Just sorting a couple of things out before we give them the go ahead.

I've been working on writing up a Story Design Document for the game, and have been writing out some Lore for the world and detailing important aspects to the narrative. I've also been making more extensive notes (mainly for myself) on what the levels after the factory will look like and have begun creating some concept art for them too. Currently, we've only really been showing visuals pertaining to the first level, which is the factory assembly line where Klank (the 'Warden' Model Number 24601) is built and, because of this, people think we're going for a steam-punk heavy themed game.

This isn't the cast though, since after you leave the factory area, there will be a sewer level, a slum with a lot of hobo Ogres and also a fungus swamp (to name a few levels planned). Since I've been sketching things for the swamp recently, I thought I'd show you some of the ones I've done so far.

Right now, I'm trying to decide on how fleshy looking and gross I want things in the swamp to look and am looking up a lot of images of microscopic bacteria, human organs, and other rank things to get inspired. Next, I'll be working on an hd version of a giant mushroom, a giant toad and some kind of worm too. Once I've got some of this done, I'm going to explore some colours and different lighting ideas for what the level could look like. All of which I intend to share with you.

So thats it for now, I hope that you have found this interesting because I want to try to update you more regularly with this sort of content and try to talk more about my thought process for creating the world and its entities. I've been thinking of doing screen casts of me painting, so you can see how I go about creating these things, and am going to try to blog more regularly on both my personal blog and the OniBlog.

For now, have a good week and we'll speak again soon!

--Lloyd

(see these updates earlier by subscribing to our mailing list)

[Noogai03]

This reminds me a _lot_ of Machinarium which is very good because the art and atmosphere in that game makes me cry with joy 
The ONLY piece of art in this that I'm not so keen on is the main character (lol). It doesn't quite feel "normal" to me; maybe it's the joints or the face but it feels a little off to me...
Probably not very useful but I'm definitely looking on at this with interest!

[Dan_Tsukasa]

The artwork here is lovely, really interested in the swamp area.

How are you doing the animations, are they simply spritesheets or are you animating the limbs (ala Vanillaware,LIMBO, Spriter etc).

[OniWorld]

This reminds me a _lot_ of Machinarium which is very good because the art and atmosphere in that game makes me cry with joy  
The ONLY piece of art in this that I'm not so keen on is the main character (lol). It doesn't quite feel "normal" to me; maybe it's the joints or the face but it feels a little off to me...
Probably not very useful but I'm definitely looking on at this with interest!

Alot of people have given us that feedback, we're glad that the factory area makes you feel that way - now hopefully we can do that with the 9 or so other areas in the game From the dark damp sewers, to the poverty stricken slums, to the sulfur ridden swamps, to the rolling green basalt hill lands, to the dry arid deserts and of course, to the ruined shifting city of elders - we have so much in store for you guys and we've barely even scratched the surface.

Klank's appearance is ever changing, we've got some animations on the way that we'll post to get some feedback. The work posted on Klank in this thread was very work in progress.

The artwork here is lovely, really interested in the swamp area.

How are you doing the animations, are they simply spritesheets or are you animating the limbs (ala Vanillaware,LIMBO, Spriter etc).

Thankyou!

We're using Spine for animations, it's a really nice tool that was funded by Kickstarter. Played with a few other tools, but this one just seems perfect.

[Dan_Tsukasa]

Thankyou!

We're using Spine for animations, it's a really nice tool that was funded by Kickstarter. Played with a few other tools, but this one just seems perfect.

I use Spriter myself but spine seems quite good, I need to take it for a test run, are you also using the mesh deformation tools?

[OniWorld]

I use Spriter myself but spine seems quite good, I need to take it for a test run, are you also using the mesh deformation tools?

Yeah we took a look at that, it wasn't really for us. Spine was made by game developers for game developers - plus it has some pretty sweet features. We haven't used them yet, but we do plan to. If our Kickstarter succeeds, we'll be buying a professional license so we can have access to all of that juicy goodness.

On an unrelated note, we've setup a YouTube channel where you can see Lloyd speed drawing, engine tech demos, development updates and alot more in the near future.

[OniWorld]

Happy Valentines Day, love from Sam and Lloyd <3

[OniWorld]

Vlog #1
The fabled insomnia hit me tonight, so I decided to get out of bed at around 2am and start working - I also decided to record my progress. I've wanted to start doing vlogs for a while, it lets you see the personal side of game development. I'm going to try and get these out as often as possible, hopefully at least once a week.

[Dan_Tsukasa]

Vlog #1
The fabled insomnia hit me tonight, so I decided to get out of bed at around 2am and start working - I also decided to record my progress. I've wanted to start doing vlogs for a while, it lets you see the personal side of game development. I'm going to try and get these out as often as possible, hopefully at least once a week.

That lighting engine is lovely, would it be possible for you to explain quite how it works? It appears to work based on 2 factors, shape and distance. However since the game is 2D I'm taking a guess that you're perhaps using a seperate map on each object to account for lighting profiles, is this a normal map or say for example a specular map?

If its neither of these then I'm stumped as to how your lighting seems to adhere to the objects shape, and thats very impressive.

[OniWorld]

That lighting engine is lovely, would it be possible for you to explain quite how it works? It appears to work based on 2 factors, shape and distance. However since the game is 2D I'm taking a guess that you're perhaps using a seperate map on each object to account for lighting profiles, is this a normal map or say for example a specular map?

If its neither of these then I'm stumped as to how your lighting seems to adhere to the objects shape, and thats very impressive.

Thankyou!

So the lighting engine actually uses none of those methods. I was going to add in normal mapping, but I decided to put it off as there are more important things to work on - plus, normal maps will probably be quite slow on lower-end devices. We want the game to look beautiful on every device it is played on, so we've been thinking up techniques that look awesome and run smoothly. This is one of them.

How it works is quite simple, it just took quite a bit of tweaking to get right. First, we render the diffuse map and the light map and then pass those textures to the pixel shader. We then add the ambient colour to the light map. Once this is done, we multiply the diffuse map by the light map (standard) and store it in ft3 (temporary variable). Pretty standard lighting code, right? Now, we do something like this to extract the light areas:

Code:

ft0 = saturate((ft3 - threshold) / (1 - threshold)) * intensity

The threshold is around 0.5, and intensity around 0.6, this extracts the light-ish areas of the scene. It gives us something like this:

Now, we have to darken the same areas in the composite map (ft3), this avoids it looking too "hot". Subtracting that gives us this:

Finally, we add these two together, giving us this:

Here's the AGAL code, lets see if you can make sense of it...

Also, we have another treat for you guys! Here's a long, detailed video break down of the thought process behind creating some concept designs for a giant mushroom that will appear in Klank's Story. Lloyd talks through and shows some early rough sketches, a refined line image, the screen capture of that line image being painted in Photoshop, and a much more finished piece.

[Dan_Tsukasa]

Thankyou!

So the lighting engine actually uses none of those methods. I was going to add in normal mapping, but I decided to put it off as there are more important things to work on - plus, normal maps will probably be quite slow on lower-end devices. We want the game to look beautiful on every device it is played on, so we've been thinking up techniques that look awesome and run smoothly. This is one of them.

How it works is quite simple, it just took quite a bit of tweaking to get right. First, we render the diffuse map and the light map and then pass those textures to the pixel shader. We then add the ambient colour to the light map. Once this is done, we multiply the diffuse map by the light map (standard) and store it in ft3 (temporary variable). Pretty standard lighting code, right? Now, we do something like this to extract the light areas:

Code:

ft0 = saturate((ft3 - threshold) / (1 - threshold)) * intensity

The threshold is around 0.5, and intensity around 0.6, this extracts the light-ish areas of the scene. It gives us something like this:

Now, we have to darken the same areas in the composite map (ft3), this avoids it looking too "hot". Subtracting that gives us this:

Finally, we add these two together, giving us this:

That was a brilliant breakdown, I actually have no idea what AGL is (I'm a 3D Artist not a coder) but you still managed to break it down into something I can understand, even code wise.

The normal mapping method would use more memory indeed, however you could reduce that load by creating a normal map based on the current screen layout, of course this would have to be regularly rebuilt and I think for anything like an iPad this wouldn't be the smartest solution, especially since yours seems to work so well.

However the downside is that your engine only creates shadows on the objects themselves, it cannot, for example, create a shadow on the floor from a pipe above, or from the character. I'm also guessing its not dynamic, but with your games lovely art style I don't think lack of dynamic lighting really matters.

Also, we have another treat for you guys! Here's a long, detailed video break down of the thought process behind creating some concept designs for a giant mushroom that will appear in Klank's Story. Lloyd talks through and shows some early rough sketches, a refined line image, the screen capture of that line image being painted in Photoshop, and a much more finished piece.

I remember this from Reddit, I commented and selected choice 4, there was some great advice in that feedback thread too.

[08--n7.r6-79.84]

Really like what I see ITT.   

[OniWorld]

That was a brilliant breakdown, I actually have no idea what AGL is (I'm a 3D Artist not a coder) but you still managed to break it down into something I can understand, even code wise.

The normal mapping method would use more memory indeed, however you could reduce that load by creating a normal map based on the current screen layout, of course this would have to be regularly rebuilt and I think for anything like an iPad this wouldn't be the smartest solution, especially since yours seems to work so well.

However the downside is that your engine only creates shadows on the objects themselves, it cannot, for example, create a shadow on the floor from a pipe above, or from the character. I'm also guessing its not dynamic, but with your games lovely art style I don't think lack of dynamic lighting really matters.

I remember this from Reddit, I commented and selected choice 4, there was some great advice in that feedback thread too.

I love writing up breakdowns like that, glad it helped! The main issue with normal mapping is we'd need around double the amount of textures, and we already have two sets: SD and HD. So we'll need normal maps for both of these, and let me tell you - the HD textures are large. If I get spare time, I might implement normal mapping and we can use it selectively, but we'll see.

Yeah I see what you mean, dynamic lighting would really liven up the scene. We had to make a choice here, we can either support dynamic shadowing or we can design that manually. We went with manual design instead purely because of performance, there isn't really a good way to bake lighting in 2D that's efficient. Although, if anyone knows of any articles on the matter - feel free to point me in the right direction!

Oh you were in that thread too? Awesome. Yeah I love /r/indiegaming now, I've never been a massive reddit user but I think I will be from now on.

Really like what I see ITT.    

We're just getting started Check this out:

[Dan_Tsukasa]

I love writing up breakdowns like that, glad it helped! The main issue with normal mapping is we'd need around double the amount of textures, and we already have two sets: SD and HD. So we'll need normal maps for both of these, and let me tell you - the HD textures are large. If I get spare time, I might implement normal mapping and we can use it selectively, but we'll see.

You wouldn't need HD normal maps, since you don't get upclose and personal with them like in a 2D game, and they're only used for lighting and not for making objects 'pop' then it won't be at al noticeable, run a few tests when/if you decide to go that route, pretty sure it won't be noticable, or if so the difference will be negligible anyway.

Also, that animation is awesome.

[OniWorld]

You wouldn't need HD normal maps, since you don't get upclose and personal with them like in a 2D game, and they're only used for lighting and not for making objects 'pop' then it won't be at al noticeable, run a few tests when/if you decide to go that route, pretty sure it won't be noticable, or if so the difference will be negligible anyway.

Also, that animation is awesome.

That's actually a really good point, didn't think of it like that before. Hell, could even downsize them even more if needs be. I think I've got an idea on how to work normal mapping in, looking better on higher end devices too... I'll get back to you on that when I've got it done.

Thanks for the kind words and inspiration! 

[OniWorld]

Got some more animations for you to feast your eyes upon!

I've also updated the main thread post, long overdue.