There's been some heavy work this month fixing the issues found on the Kickstarter footage.
Character DesignHere's the new Aragami Character Concept revealed some weeks ago. Some of its perks:
- A lot more little details like loose cloth pieces, belts, ragged cloth, etc. The main scarf and loose clothes will feature cloth physics.
- More contrasts and color variety. The old character was almost fully grey, there's now more bright colored details all around the body.
- Less emissive details by default (they'll be active mostly when the character's hidden).
- Only one scarf to simplify UI design and be more friendly to cloth physics.
- More realistic proportions to enable better transition from motion capture animations.
The transition to 3D model requires a technical T-Pose concept:
And finally, the 3D models:
There's still some work to do fixing some errors with the texture UVs (like the missing emissions on the leg protections) and the emissive runes/scarf design, but this is really close to what we want.
We are now focused on adding the all new motion capture animations (which should be done by the next 2 or 3 weeks) and adding cloth physics to the 'scarf' and the different loose cloth pieces.
Oh, and here's a test on Sketchfab:
Aragami 2.0 by
Lince Works on
SketchfabAbout the scarf design: We want the scarf runes to convey the character's remaining Shadow Energy. Similarly, enemy guards will feature similar runes to show their available Light Energy to cast powers. Shadow Energy recharges while staying in the shadows, enemy Light Energy recharges by staying near a strong light source (like a bonfire or a torch).
The new scarf features some 6 slots surrounding another big slot in the middle. We'll talk a bit more about this in the future but mainly, each slot will contain a single use of an Advanced Shadow Power, while the middle slot tells the player which is the currently selected Advanced Shadow Power. We may iterate over this design in the future.
Lighting ModelRemember how when the new Zelda Wind Waker HD was announced everything looked more.. "next-gen"? Well, the greater resolution and post fx like Bloom sure helped a lot.. but something people really didn't notice was the new lighting model.
Both games use cel shading (there's no light gradient from the angle of light hitting the polygon faces), but the point lights behave differently. In the original Wind Waker there's no light attenuation: every polygon inside the light radius is fully lit, and a polygon outside is not lit. In Wind Waker HD there's an attenuation gradient that softens everything.
In Path of Shadows and until now in Twin Souls we've used the original Wind Waker approach, but we've finally decided to switch to the 'HD approach' while maintaining a clear distinction of what geometry is being lit by the point light and which is not. We will stick to this approach for a while and see if it works out with the game's aesthetic.
There's no color correction on the 2nd screenshot, but I wanted you to notice the difference between the light models.
We've also lighten up everything, as that was one common among between users.
First Boss: Hikaru
Revealing our first Boss! In Twin Souls there's no 'Boss Battles' as we may know from other games, since the notion of a head to head fight in a Stealth game is not really coherent. Instead, Boss Battles in Twin Souls would be better defined as
Boss Scenarios (like some Arkham Series battles, or Mark of the Ninja).
Hikari is an expert swordman who carries a Light Energy storage on his back, making him extremely dangerous. We are not spoiling how the boss battle will work, but it will require some planning and finding a way to gradually weaken Hikari and make him vulnerable.
Other StuffThere's not much else to show right now. There's work on game menus and PC graphic options as seen in these screenshots:
We are also redesigning our Mission Editor tools to be much more powerful and retain the aesthetics of the rest of the game; that means any player will be able to create missions in graveyards, forests or the city with a big variety of assets (both functional and just for aesthetics). You'll be able to modify terrain, place walls, bridges, rivers, trees, particle systems, etc..
I'll write again when there's something interesting to show, thank your for reading!
