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[William Chyr]

it looks like you are adding a lot of details, have you noticed an impact on performance?
I was also wondering how you are creating the levels. is a lot done procedurally, or all manual slave work?

The performance definitely does take a hit, but that's also largely because I haven't done a whole lot of optimization yet.

The levels are a combination of manual and procedural (mostly manual). I do plan on doing more procedural stuff later for the more spectacle levels.

[Lo-Fi]

I was worried that the game would look too similar throughout, but those latest screenshots have quit my worrying! Love how the difference in the amount of detail in that world creates a completely different feel.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #209 - 05/13/2015

Went back to Toronto this past weekend. There were a few things going on: Toronto Comic Arts Festival, the Bit Bazaar, my 10-year high school reunion, and Mother's day. It was a nice way to catch up with old friends, spend time with family, and check out some games all in one trip.

It was a very relaxing trip, and something I really needed. I love working on RELATIVITY, but it's nice to be able to get away. I was originally scheduled to fly back to Chicago on Monday evening, but just as my flight was about to take off, the airport went into ground stop because of fog. My flight had to be rescheduled for next morning. I think in the past I would have been really annoyed, as I had spent an hour and a half getting to the airport, went through security and all that, but I wasn't bothered at all. I just saw it as getting to spend more time with my family.

Anyway, here's some pictures I took from my trip:

TCAF:


I grew up in Toronto and used to frequent the Reference Library quite a bit. Had never seen it with this many people before!


Moon Hunters!

Bit Bazaar:


Droqen teaching someone how to play Unavowed, which is a game that he's making with FromSmiling.


PSHNGGG


Upstairs


Octodad!

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #210 - 05/14/2015

It's definitely been difficult getting back into the swing of things after getting back from Toronto.

I've started adding sound effects.

David's been working on several debug tools (noclip, optional mouse smoothing, HUD toggle, etc). Also more work on optimization, as well as redoing the world wrapping system.

Everything is looking good, but there is just a ton of things going on at once, so it feels quite overwhelming at times.

Lots of exciting news to come in the next few weeks.

Anyway, I also got Amplify Color and started playing around with color grading using the LUT editor. Very happy with the results so far. However, the shader doesn't seem to work on the PS4 devkit, so going to have to spend some time looking into that.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #211 - 05/15/2015

Worked on UI today, specifically button prompts that pop up.

Going to go with a mostly minimalist approach while staying consistent with the game's art style:





I might try it in 3D space as well, as opposed to just having it in screen space. We'll see.

[Connor]

good to see you went with my suggestion ^^ looks awesome. also, you ever pass near kamloops, bc, make a stop in the sleepy town of ashcroft in the okanogan. its an amazing little town, and they have bull rodeos every once in a while on the road there, i believe. its also one of the many little towns im debating moving to one day, since me and it has some pretty far back history

[William Chyr]

good to see you went with my suggestion ^^ looks awesome. also, you ever pass near kamloops, bc, make a stop in the sleepy town of ashcroft in the okanogan. its an amazing little town, and they have bull rodeos every once in a while on the road there, i believe. its also one of the many little towns im debating moving to one day, since me and it has some pretty far back history

I've only ever been to BC once, and that was for SIGGRAPH last year. I didn't get to see much outside of the convention center, but it's certainly beautiful. If I do go back and have sometime, I'll be sure to check out Ashcroft!

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #212 - 05/15/2015

Spent much of today struggling with the Unity 5 UI. Man, I just can't wrap myself around it. It seems really unfriendly to more code-based approaches. Where are all the hooks!?

Anyway, one really cool thing is that Amplify Creations, which makes Amplify Color (the Unity plugin I'm using for color grading) saw me talking on twitter about how Amplify Color doesn't work on the PS4 devkit, and offered to send me the latest build, which did work!

Sweet!

Here's a screenshot that I captured off of the devkit:



So happy to have both the PC and PS4 versions consistent.

Also started working on a new level. It is waaaay more fun than working on UI.  

[stopthief]

Hey Willy,

Played this back at IndieCade in October, and I'm super excited you got backed!  I love the more city-looking world you were showing off in some of your recent updates!  It works really nicely with the visuals you already have. Is it going to be a whole level transition after you beat the first world, or is it something else?  (Forgive me if I missed it somewhere, I've only been lurking on these forums for the last month or so ).

[William Chyr]

Hey Willy,

Played this back at IndieCade in October, and I'm super excited you got backed!  I love the more city-looking world you were showing off in some of your recent updates!  It works really nicely with the visuals you already have. Is it going to be a whole level transition after you beat the first world, or is it something else?  (Forgive me if I missed it somewhere, I've only been lurking on these forums for the last month or so ).

Thanks so much for checking out the game during IndieCade!!

That's a completely different world, and there will be plenty more of them. I'm still nailing down the transitions, but will be talking about that stuff soon.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #213 - 05/19/2015

I streamed for the first time yesterday! Did some level design and showed a bit of the framework in which everything takes place.

Here's my Twitch page: http://www.twitch.tv/willychyr

Follow me there if you'd like to see more streams in the future. I think I'm going to do more live level design and development in the future as well.  

This post from Rami Ismail about development streaming was really helpful.

As was this

.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #214 - 05/26/2015

Sigma Play

I went to Sigma Play this past weekend. It's a game design conference in Bloomington, IN.

I was giving a talk about the design of Relativity, and the infinite architecture that exists in the game.

Below are some pictures.

Welcome to Bloomington:


On Friday night, a keynote speech by Bernie De Koven


After Bernie's keynote, it was time for game demos:




Stacks on Stacks on Stacks:




Really intense discussion about a board game:


Hanging out afterwards, which of course turned into more game demoing:


Jen Helm speaking on Saturday about educational games:


The conference ended with a session of social games led by Bernie De Koven at WonderLab, a science museum in Bloomginton:


All in all, a really fun weekend for me. Bloomington has a very cool game dev community.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #215 - 05/26/2015

Memory Leak Bug

For about the past week, there had been this really annoying bug - whenever the game was running on the PS4 devkit or my laptop, it would crash after about 5 minutes. What made this extra annoying was that I could't replicate the issue on my desktop.

Talking to David, we determined it was a memory leak of sorts.

I pulled up the Unity Profiler, which has a section to look at current memory.

I saw that my material count was increasing by the thousands every frame. Within about 3 minutes, it was already at 70K and still increasing. This seemed quite strange to me.

As it turns out, in one of my scripts Update() function, I was calling Renderer.Material every frame, which as a result was creating new instances of material, hence the leak.

After I commented out the line responsible for this (don't even remember what it was supposed to do in the first place), the game no longer crashed.

[Bluebutton]

This is a pretty incredible thread. Having made a first person puzzler I can't help but be inspired by what I've seen here. Interesting how you took on picking up and moving the cubes a while back. It's a complicated problem.

Looks great, how are you actually building the level geometry?

[CaLooch]

as far as bugs go, fixing a memory leak is the most satisfying tasty type of bug to solve, for me atleast.  Theyre usually well disguised and when theyre fixed, random crashes and performance issues seem to melt away.  Good stuff dude.

[William Chyr]

This is a pretty incredible thread. Having made a first person puzzler I can't help but be inspired by what I've seen here. Interesting how you took on picking up and moving the cubes a while back. It's a complicated problem.

Looks great, how are you actually building the level geometry?

Thank you! Ya, you wouldn't think a simple action like pick up and moving cubes would be that complicated... But it's a fundamental action so it's important to get it right.

As for level geometry, I actually build everything inside Unity using ProBuilder.

as far as bugs go, fixing a memory leak is the most satisfying tasty type of bug to solve, for me atleast.  Theyre usually well disguised and when theyre fixed, random crashes and performance issues seem to melt away.  Good stuff dude.

I know what you mean. I felt like a total badass when I fixed the issue.

[Bluebutton]

As for level geometry, I actually build everything inside Unity using ProBuilder.

Ah I guessed as much. That's what I used to build Polarity. Seems the only way to go with level building in Unity.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #216 - 05/27/2015

Worked on some repeated architecture levels. These were in previous version of the game. I've recreated them in the latest build and did some clean up:

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #217 - 05/31/2015

Playing around with using a fractal generating script in Unity with the ProBuilder API.

The reason for using the ProBuilder API is so that I can edit the objects afterwards if necessary. I'm thinking of using the generation script primary as a foundation for creating interesting level design.

(If you're interesting in playing with the ProBuilder API, inside the ProCore folder, there is actually an example script that shows you on to instantiate ProBuilder shapes, apply vertex color, and set the size, etc).

Also, the PS4 version of the game is coming along well. Really happy with the developer tools that we've added to the game. Being able to switch on NoClip has been absolutely invaluable.

Here are some of the coolest screenshots from the experiments with fractal generating.


 

[eigenbom]

Looking great dude :D