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[fonserbc]

Looking forward to see the new character in movement!

[xdavidleon]

Upgrade to Unity 5 beta and ported my custom shaders to the new pipeline. I added some Rim Lighting and Specular to the character shaders, so it now looks like this (click to expand):



I'm finding many bugs and issues with the Unity 5 beta.. the worst offender is that the Cloth component is unusable; I'll try to find a fix next week.

[btxsqdr]

Nice to see you're still working on it. Like the progress

[RinseWashrepeat]

Really hoping this works out for you all. I came for the mention of Tenchu, I stayed because it looks like you've made a great start. 

[xdavidleon]

Spent the weekend at the Fun&Serious Games Festival in Bilbao, Spain. We showed there the first playable prototype of Twin Souls with great success!

The game has evolved a lot since our Kickstarter campaign past Summer. The lighting pipeline has changed, there's a new main character model, new levels and we are redesigning other stuff.

We are now looking for a publisher to help us fund the game in order to finish it.

Here's a pair of new GIFs  




Among other stuff we are also redesigning Yamiko, the 'other Twin Soul' from the title



We are still thinking how to go about marketing/publishing etc.. as Steam Early Access has lost all its strength due to low quality games.

[MisterAssassin]

I wish you all a happy new year!

I have been worried that this game was left for dead, but luckiely that is not the case yay! There are not many good stealth games this day's, the thief reboot showed what the great publishers think of us sneaksy guys.

Because of that, I followed your game scince path of shadows and hope you will pull through! I cant wait to play it! The new character designs are awesome.

And because there is currently no stealth games in the pipelines and thief4 made many fans of the genre (like me) think of past days, you may have a good chance!

Kudos, this game looks amazing!

[Alec S.]

This is looking great.  You had me at "verticality"

[xdavidleon]

I wish you all a happy new year!

I have been worried that this game was left for dead, but luckiely that is not the case yay! There are not many good stealth games this day's, the thief reboot showed what the great publishers think of us sneaksy guys.

Because of that, I followed your game scince path of shadows and hope you will pull through! I cant wait to play it! The new character designs are awesome.

And because there is currently no stealth games in the pipelines and thief4 made many fans of the genre (like me) think of past days, you may have a good chance!

Kudos, this game looks amazing!

Thanks a lot!

It's definitely not dead. We are currently working on a new video showcasing all the progress we've done this year since the unsuccessful Kickstarter.

This month we'll focus on polishing the first levels of the game and adding quality audio+music, and it's time we start working on a polished version of the mission editor.

[xdavidleon]

The promised video is now online! In this first devlog video of 2015 we are showing some new gameplay material, focusing on the main character (Aragami), his powers and the motion capture animation pipeline.





(Is there any reason why there's no Youtube/WebM embedding? Would do wonders for dev logs..)

Here's some new screenshots done this month:







We've spent this last month narrowing down the project's scope so we can plan better the following months and set feasible milestones for ourselves. We've recorded a lot of new enemy animations so we can later implement new AI behaviours like surprise, stunned, enemies chatting, stopping during patrols to look around... that kind of stuff.

Later today I'll write about some of the shading tweaks I've done to Unity to get our cel shading looks in Twin Souls. Is there anything else you'd like to know about the development process?

[Christian]

Would be interesting to learn more about the shadow powers. How have those abilities evolved since the Kickstarter last year?

[xdavidleon]

Would be interesting to learn more about the shadow powers. How have those abilities evolved since the Kickstarter last year?

Besides the Shadow Creation and the Shadow Leap, we've narrowed the 'Greater Shadow Powers' to 6. These are powers you'll be able to unlock by finding Shadow Orbs through the game (like the runes in Dishonored?). The character will have a secondary energy bar for these special powers and there won't be many possibilities to refill this energy through the level, so the player has to think very carefully when to use each power. There's 3 aggressive powers and 3 pacific/stealth oriented powers.

The powers right now are:

• Izanami: Aragami channels shadow energy into a solid weapon, throwing it to a targetted enemy, killing him instantly. An expensive long-range attack.
• Burakkuhooru: Aragami draws a dark hex onto an enemy's back or any surface, which can later be triggered to create an explosion of dark energy. A 'C4' mechanic that creates a black hole when triggered.
• Fūjin : Aragami throws dense shadows in front of him, blinding enemies caught in the attack. A mechanic to stun enemies in a cone arc.
• Seishin: Aragami transforms into his spirit form, were he can become one with the shadows for a small amount of time. A temporary invisibility that turns off torches (making noise and possibly alerting guards) if you go near them.
• Sukkaku: Aragami summons an humanoid shadow at the target position, which makes an eerie sound to attract nearby enemies. A long range decoy / distraction generator.
• Karasu: Aragami's companion raven surveys the environment highlighting enemies and objects. Auto-explanatory.

[xdavidleon]

Since there were some people interested in knowing about the shading pipeline in Twin Souls I wanted to write a small bit about it.

While with normal shading the lighting creates a gradient on a surface depending on its normals, with Cel Shading a pixel is just lit or not lit, there's no 'grades' or amounts of light.



The left column would be your usual shading technique, while the other columns (most noticeable on the top-right one) use Cel Shading. This look is decided by the dot product of the surface normal and the light direction, which I call the NdotL.

In Unity3D, when you use the Deferred Pipeline, you can download the built-in shaders and copy Internal-PrePassLighting.shader into your Resources folder. Modify that file and find the line:

Code:

half diff = max (0, dot (lightDir, normal));

That's your NdotL equation. You could modify it so if that a 'diff' greater than 0 will always be 1, and a diff smaller than 0 will always be 0; that's how we have it set up in Twin Souls, and would behave pretty simmilarly to the top-right sphere in the image.

In the next 2 screenshots there's Aragami with no shading and later with cel shading and shadows applied. You could argue that it's just flat shading with shadow casting, but when there's more than 1 light (point lights for example), you can then notice the difference between cel shading and just flat shading + shadows.



 
In Unity we use the Edge Detect Effect Normals component in 'Robert Cross Depth Normals' mode. Finally, we use some tone/color mapping to enhance some colors.

That's more or less it, unless anyone has any more questions

[xdavidleon]

We finally finished the concept art for the Forest levels, and polished a bit the other pieces.

This month we are focusing on adding story elements and cinematics to the first level, and finishing the 2nd and 3rd level gameplay-wise. I also redesigned the Level Editor, which is a bit too early to show (but it will be amazing!).

We also finished the concept art for the Forest scenarios and polished other art pieces.












Let's hope I can finish some Level Editor stuff this weekend and share it around! 

[xdavidleon]

We are still struggling about deciding on a new logo design.



On Twitter and Facebook, it looks like people like number 2 and 3. Might iterate over those 2 a bit more.

[xdavidleon]

Some new screenshots featuring Yamiko, the other 'twin soul' in the game. She summons you from the dead and guides you through your journey.







And also some new concept art with the final logo!

[Sierus]

Loving all the stuff! 

[xdavidleon]

There are 2 basic abilities available to you from the start of the game: Shadow Creation and Shadow Leap. Shadow Creation let’s you create shadows anywhere in the world, and Shadow Leap let’s you teleport instantly between any two shadows. The combination of those powers gives you almost unlimited mobility in the world, letting you move behind enemy positions (or above them) and explore your surroundings undetected.

But there’s much more than those 2 powers. It’s now time to talk about the Advanced Shadow Powers you can unlock through the game.

There are 6 unlockable Shadow Powers: 3 “Yūrei” (Ghost) Powers, and 3 Shinigami (Death God) Powers, which correspond to two different play styles.

Kage



Use darkness as a cloak to stay invisible for a brief amount of time.

Karasu



Summon your pet raven to give you the location of nearby enemies.

Sakkaku



Summon a Shadow Clone to distract your targets and play with their senses.

Kurai



Temporarily blind your enemies and stop pursuers to help you escape.

Shinen



Place traps and trigger them at will to call upon the abyss.

Kunai



Solidify the shadows into a deadly weapon and snipe down distant enemies.

[xdavidleon]

Added ragdolls to enemy corpses. It took quite a while to get the hang of it (switching from Animated model to ragdoll), but disabling the Animator and Character Controller gets half the job done.

As a weekend project I'll be playing around with multiplayer, but it's not really a planned feature for now, I just like to test out misc stuff on weekends

[xdavidleon]

Man.. it really requires commitment to post occasionally here.. Always something to do that leaves me with no time for dev logs etc, and that's a shame, as they are great to log progress, and awesome to look back to.

Ok, the last few months we've been polishing our completed scenarios (all the Graveyard), and other visual stuff. I created some new fog particles which, combined with a Global Fog Camera Post FX, added some really nice eerie ambient to the scene.








Some of those screenshots are from Level 1.. others from Level 2. I still haven't added particle effects to the 3rd level.. so I'll add some shots a bit later. Level 4 is completed but needs some art polishing. We also finished designing the 3 Boss Battles in the game.. can't wait to implement them

We didn't like our shadow particles.. they lost alpha through time and they looked to me like 'smoke' or even vapor.. so I changed the shader to use alpha cut instead of a normal alphablend. I had to change the texture alpha layer, but it was really worth it:



We use Particle Playground for Unity3D, which let's us add manipulators. We use those to create a 'gravitational' effect at the character's hand, creating the effect you see in the gif.

Here's it ingame in a screenshot:



And gif:



Finally, doing some playtesting we noticed that people didn't understand energy consumption. We added feedback to the scarf runes, so now your spent Energy is shown in red instead of just removing that part of the scarf instantly.



I think that's all for today. Any questions, I'd be glad to answer them.

I'll be spending next week creating our first real trailer in time for the E3! Although we can't attend E3 (too damn expensive, and even more for someone from Spain..) we intend to attend Gamescom in Cologne this August, and with a playable version of the game of 1 or 2 hours of gameplay!

If we are lucky enough to be selected for Indiecade or PAX Prime with IndieMegabooth then we'll be able to bring the game to the USA. Let's wait and see if there's luck.

[Dank3yKang]

Followed for sure. Love that shader and the whole overall aesthetic of the game. Can't wait to try a demo