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[William Chyr]

I really like how the trees are switched on like light bulbs. :D

(Maybe it would look even better with a slower transition and some random delay for the individual leave parts of the trees? It could give the impression of bloom.)

Yes, I do indeed plan on having the colors transition for all the game objects (cubes, trees, etc) alongside the walls. I might add a burst in bloom during the transition (have the emission increase slightly), to make the effect more dramatic. We'll see. Will definitely be experimenting with this in the coming months.

I notice there are still some issues with the transition to black. using rgb channels would make way more sense to me, than using two textures. do you know why it was less sharp? my approach would be to have one texture. red inner, green center, blue outer color. the black lines would be also included. then there is never a direct overlap of red/green/blue. in the shader you replace everything red with your new colors. e.g. red to orange is 1-0-0 -> 1, 0.5, 0 and dark-red to dark-orange is 0.5, 0, 0 -> 0.5, 0.25, 0. you just multiply the new color with the value of the red channel.

the new transitions when changing surfaces look really awesome!

Hey! Thanks for the the tip! After reading this, I actually ended up switching back to using the RGB channels instead, and it actually brought the texture count down to one instead of two. It actually also reduced overall texture count because it meant I didn't need to have a separate texture for the active state and another one for the inactive state.

The trick was lowering the threshold for cutoff. Instead of 0.8, I lowered it down to 0.3, and then got rid of the color variations in the boundary areas:

[marcgfx]

hey willy, glad I could give you that incentive, sounds like a worth while reduction

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #198 - 04/16/2015

Rebuilding of World 1 continues. Almost done! It's 90% there. Also, BIG NEWS tomorrow!

[Zorg]

It looks like many trees live inside buildings in your world.

[William Chyr]

It looks like many trees live inside buildings in your world.

As long as there's water and ample sunlight, why not? 

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #199 - 04/17/2015

Indie Fund now backing RELATIVITY



I am beyond stoked to announce that RELATIVITY is now being backed by Indie Fund!

This really is a huge honor for me. I started working on RELATIVITY in November 2012, and the Indie Fund games have always been a huge source of inspiration and influence for me: Q.U.B.E., Antichamber, Fract OSC, Framed, the Swapper, the list goes on.

This is even without mentioning the works of the founders, which has had a huge impact on the indie game space.

All this is to say, I have had a tremendous amount of respect for Indie Fund for a long time, and have always thought about how cool it would be to be on their roster. So to finally be able to say that RELATIVITY is now an Indie Fund project really is a dream come true for me. 




Chris Priestman of Kill Screen wrote a really great piece about what the process has been so far, and what getting Indie Fund means.

Besides the financial element, the most significant part is having validation of my work by people who I really respect. As someone with 0 game development experience prior to this project, I was never sure of myself. Every time I thought that something was good, I couldn't tell if it was actually good, or if I was just being delusional. Getting support from Indie Fund lets me know that I'm on the right track.

For now, the funding has allowed me to bring on a programmer to help me with the project. David Laskey is a local Chicago developer who I've known for quite some time, and who is a brilliant programmer (far, far better than I am). Even though he has only been helping me part-time for less than 2 weeks, he has already done some really great work. I can't wait to show you guys what we're working on!

[oldblood]

Congrats! Thats a lot of awesome news!

[William Chyr]

Congrats! Thats a lot of awesome news!

Thank you!

[NinthPower]

Congrats Willy, this has come so far. Can't wait to see where it's going next You can make the game you really want to!!

[archgame]

I've been following this game for awhile and enjoying all the development (especially the constant pictures/gifs on twitter), but this came across my twitter feed this morning and made me extremely happy! Congrats on the Indie Fund, but also the article by Priestman was really great! It was nice to get more insight into the game. Basically, I'm just really glad to see this game in Kill Screen!

Also, as an architect I'm excited to see how your game generates new conceptions of spatial organization.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #200 - 04/20/2015

Congrats Willy, this has come so far. Can't wait to see where it's going next You can make the game you really want to!!

Thanks so much! It's surprising to me how much to game has grown. I remember when I first started the devlog, I actually thought the game looked really great back then. And yeah, definitely having Indie Fund's support means I'm be able to bring the game to its full potential!

I've been following this game for awhile and enjoying all the development (especially the constant pictures/gifs on twitter), but this came across my twitter feed this morning and made me extremely happy! Congrats on the Indie Fund, but also the article by Priestman was really great! It was nice to get more insight into the game. Basically, I'm just really glad to see this game in Kill Screen!

Also, as an architect I'm excited to see how your game generates new conceptions of spatial organization.

Thank you so much for the support! And yes, really happy with Priestman's article. He was actually one of the first journalists to take note of the game when I shared some early screenshots during Screenshot Saturday a long long time ago. And Kill Screen was of the few video game journals I was familiar with before I even got into games (my roommate at the time had a subscription), so it's quite meaningful for me to finally have an article about the game on the site.

I can't wait for you try to game and hear your perspective on it as an architect. Soon!


Finished rebuilding World 1. It definitely needs some serious optimization. In the Unity editor, it seems to be running at around 20 FPS on average. On the PS4 devkit, it seems to run pretty well. Definitely 30+ FPS for the most part, except for a few parts when there's a lot of rendering being done.

[gambrinous]

Congrats on getting Indie Fund! That's super! 

[Mark Mayers]

Finished rebuilding World 1. It definitely needs some serious optimization. In the Unity editor, it seems to be running at around 20 FPS on average. On the PS4 devkit, it seems to run pretty well. Definitely 30+ FPS for the most part, except for a few parts when there's a lot of rendering being done.

What are the specs of your computer? What's your GPU?

Just general advice/rhetorical questions to ask (you might already know or have considered this stuff).

How many pixel/directional lights do you have?

I've found having too many pixel or directional lights can affect performance dramatically.
Your drawcalls could raise significantly with every additional light you have.

I know you're using ProBuilder; are you combining your meshes (and removing redundant faces/vertices), or do you have objects as individual sections/cubes in world space?
If you combine your meshes it could enable better batching and reduce draw calls from shadow casting significantly.

Are your permanent world objects marked as static?

Also, you might benefit from optimizing your shaders.
Make sure you DON'T have conditional logic in any pixel/fragment shaders!! That's incredibly expensive.

Go for 1080p @60 FPS on PS4, if possible

[Connor]

grats on indie fund! your going places, my friend. keep it up!

[William Chyr]

Congrats on getting Indie Fund! That's super! 

Thank you!

What are the specs of your computer? What's your GPU?

Just general advice/rhetorical questions to ask (you might already know or have considered this stuff).

How many pixel/directional lights do you have?

I've found having too many pixel or directional lights can affect performance dramatically.
Your drawcalls could raise significantly with every additional light you have.

I know you're using ProBuilder; are you combining your meshes (and removing redundant faces/vertices), or do you have objects as individual sections/cubes in world space?
If you combine your meshes it could enable better batching and reduce draw calls from shadow casting significantly.

Are your permanent world objects marked as static?

Also, you might benefit from optimizing your shaders.
Make sure you DON'T have conditional logic in any pixel/fragment shaders!! That's incredibly expensive.

Go for 1080p @60 FPS on PS4, if possible

I am definitely planning on going for 1080p @60 FPS on the PS4, and I don't think there should be any problems.

A lot of the stuff you've pointed out I've considered already, just haven't gotten around to implementing yet. Will be doing that today, and will update here with results and details later!

grats on indie fund! your going places, my friend. keep it up!

Thanks for the continued support, Connor! Appreciate it.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #201 - 04/22/2015

Was planning to spend the day optimizing, but instead ended up taking the whole day to implement a final few gameplay elements and to make tweaks the the level.

It wasn't all in vain though. I realized the realize why Animation component wasn't working was because I hadn't marked those animations as "legacy" (which can only be seen when the inspector is in debug mode).

Anyway, I saw that Animator was taking a huge hit on the CPU, so I switched all the animation back to Animation, and things are running much smoother now.

Also, finally all the gameplay elements for world 1 are now in. Even when it comes to making levels, the last 10% really do take 90% of the work.

[The_RonJones]

Congrats on being Indie Funded... I feel like your doing a great job updated and marketing your brand/game!

[William Chyr]

Congrats on being Indie Funded... I feel like your doing a great job updated and marketing your brand/game!

Thank you! It definitely takes a lot of work updating the devlog, but I really enjoy it. And it's also really cool to see the progress of the game overtime, even for myself!

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #202 - 04/22/2015

Got around to working on the design of the start screen.

Here's a comparison of the first go at a new start screen compared to the old one:



The 'Press Start' text was too small (Unity has a font size limit), so I replaced it with a sprite:



Also tried it with a fade in fade out effect (it doesn't loop as well in gif form):

[Zaphos]

Ooh, nice!  Will be a great attract screen when you show the game again