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[Greipur]

Ah, to the little tykes will follow the adults around? That could make for a nice graphic trail effect, like a duck and her ducklings

They will stay at the houses, that's what I meant with the comparison with Knights&Merchants and Stronghold. Just like you can see the animals grow up in their stable you will see the children grow up in/around the district. I don't have any answer for how we'll solve it practically right now though.

[Greipur]

I'm finished with The Chronicler! Now off to skinning and rigging.

Christoffer has been making this mockup for the follower selection. In the upcoming update for Crest you will be able to click on individual followers and see their statistics.

Oh, and we've just secured more funding for ECS so we're hopeful for the future. Speaking of which, here's a new fancy development time line, nothing new, just a little bit more fancy.

[Greipur]

Extra! Extra! Fresh new stuff from the ECS foundry!



Jesper has been making randomly generated city names, this is a requested feature from our fan base since it makes it much easier to make battle reports or succession game stories. Now they will be able to refer to cities.

Since we want to avoid a colonial perspective, i.e. attributing Western names on Crest's people and also avoid appropriation (say, using the Zulu language for names and in essence making a statement that Crest takes place in South Africa). Instead we opted for something more abstract, we did research on common origins about cities, a common trait shared by many cultures are geographical attributes. For example my home town in Sweden "Växjö" is derived from "väg" and "sjö" which means "road" and "lake", so if it would've been an American town for example maybe Road Lake City?

Emelie wrote different attributes to the different biomes and vicinity to animals in a great old list. We use city symbol names (20 of them, fixed to each symbol) such as Elephant and combine that with an attribute, for example Elephant + Lagoon = Elephant Lagoon!

Other examples from the gif are: "Monkey Dunes, Ostrich Sands, Hawk Pride and Sun Wastes"


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Christoffer has been making time map symbols, and here's a rough draft for several of the ideas.

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And I'm finally finished with The Chronicler.

I always get giddy when I'm finishing up on the skinning, makes me itch to animate!

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If you remember the concept art for The Chronicler they had eyes that had a light that shone from within.

This is something I will solve with a shader with Shader Forge in Unity. But I need a mesh for the emission, so I did it in a similar fashion as they do with the "mouth bag" in some games, instead of modelling the inside of the whole head they just make the stuff the player can see. In this case I only cover the sockets in the empty skull.

[Greipur]

There, finished with the animations for The Chronicler. Below you can see a blocked out animation and below that the finished one. This is the animation the player is greeted with when visiting.

And I've now begun constructing the underworld. I start with just blocking it out and after that I'll spend a lot of time on shaders, which I think will be the cornerstone for making the place feel out of this world.

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Jesper has been improving the feedback for when commandments doesn't affect anyone, which has been one of the main points of confusion for many people. One way would be to limit the player to be able to write it at all, but at the same time we don't want to hinder the player since commandments can become relevant in the future, if the world changes.

He has also started with the interface for the advisors, which obviously is very much a work in progress.

Johannes has been the finishing up the new follower food and metal storage, and has started working on the new individual follower needs.




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Christoffer has been modelling advisors and managed to complete four out of six this week, pretty quick if you ask me!

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Emelie is currently writing dialogue for the advisors, we want it to be cryptic so the players aren't told explicitly what to do, more gentle nudges. This week she created a closed survey for the people in the team to match the different city needs with dialogue and we had to guess what was what, it proved that we didn't understand everything, good feedback to get it right!

[Greipur]

Here's some more from the underworld! Lighting sure is key for models or sculpture, but especially in a game without textures.

Will probably leave this for now and focus on more pressing matters. This feels like a time sink I could spend too many days on, better to get back to it when I'm more stressed.

[JobLeonard]

Nice

The glowing effect is very  different from the rest of the game, which is more flat in the lighting.

[Greipur]

Nice

The glowing effect is very  different from the rest of the game, which is more flat in the lighting.

Yes, the "prophet vision/dream look" from Deep Space Nine is finally coming to fruition, maybe looks les 90's though. I was first hesitant on using bloom, partly because some projects have overused it in the past which has made some people weary of the effect. I wanted to try though and I cranked up the standard bloom effect Unity offers and produced this subtle effect. I hope players will appreciate the change between the normal game world and the underworld, like night and day, aha ha.

Anyway, this is a new Unity scene and the programmers tells me that we'll use additive loading, which I'm sure I'll get into more in the future when they get around to do it, and I can summarise it neatly here.

[JobLeonard]

I hope players will appreciate the change between the normal game world and the underworld, like night and day, aha ha.

Make sure you think a bit about how to transition between the two; if you just "jump" it will be jarring and incoherent, but if you slowly turn the bloom on/off as a kind of fade out effect, it will probably look great.

[Greipur]

I hope players will appreciate the change between the normal game world and the underworld, like night and day, aha ha.

Make sure you think a bit about how to transition between the two; if you just "jump" it will be jarring and incoherent, but if you slowly turn the bloom on/off as a kind of fade out effect, it will probably look great.

Here's our current iteration.

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We're rushing forward with finishing up on the Ancestors module which will come out in just a few weeks! Been very hectic so I haven't had that much time to post here. I've been debating before if I'd "just" make a sort of repost of our weekly dev blog from our website, but that feels lackluster, what do you think?



Anyway, Christoffer is finished with the advisors, you can see them all here.

Jesper has been doing more work on the advisors, and the Underworld in general. The underworld is a now a separate scene, loaded in at the start of the game, allowing us to modify it separately from the overworld scene, making for some easier editing.


Emelie has been working on the dialogue for the chronicler. It’s based on the events that will be recorded and made available for the player to scroll through. As an example if a city is lost, the chronicler will say something like this: [City Name] was deserted, no one lives there anymore. This will enable players to go back and see what’s happened during their playthrough.

Johannes has been spending a lot of time with improving performance, lag spikes has been tied to the water simulation and animal herd moving AI, simplifying the instructions has really helped. He says that the fps isn't perfect yet, but at least it's stable.




And I'm in full swing with finishing up on the socialiser, been a lot of fun working on such a jovial character. Basically I'm doing two different sets of animations; for the one who listens and for the one who talks.

And Tomas has been working on notifications for the GUI, among other things. A lot of small tweaks all around for the programmers right now, not worth talking about here.

[JobLeonard]

Here's our current iteration.

Can I be honest? I don't like it :/

The crash-zoom implies we're going to look at some detail in the grass. Then we're suddenly in the underworld. But the latter doesn't look like it's "below" the ground so it's confusing.

The camera also moves to top-down birds eye, but then fades in from the side in the underworld.

It would make more spatial sense if the camera felt more "kinematically" connected. So when you start fading in the underworld, the camera starts in the same angle, top-down position, and ideally even velocity as it had when zooming into the grass, and then pans down to the side-view you end up with. If you do that it actually feels like you're moving "through" the ground and into this open other-dimensional underground spiritual place

Another option would be to zoom out far off into space; giving the earth world a "mote of dust in a sunbeam" feel while we move to spiritual matters.

[Greipur]

Here's our current iteration.

Can I be honest? I don't like it :/

The crash-zoom implies we're going to look at some detail in the grass. Then we're suddenly in the underworld. But the latter doesn't look like it's "below" the ground so it's confusing.

The camera also moves to top-down birds eye, but then fades in from the side in the underworld.

It would make more spatial sense if the camera felt more "kinematically" connected. So when you start fading in the underworld, the camera starts in the same angle, top-down position, and ideally even velocity as it had when zooming into the grass, and then pans down to the side-view you end up with. If you do that it actually feels like you're moving "through" the ground and into this open other-dimensional underground spiritual place

Another option would be to zoom out far off into space; giving the earth world a "mote of dust in a sunbeam" feel while we move to spiritual matters.

Thanks for the feedback, we'll see if we can tweak it next week.

[io3 creations]

It would make more spatial sense if the camera felt more "kinematically" connected. So when you start fading in the underworld, the camera starts in the same angle, top-down position, and ideally even velocity as it had when zooming into the grass, and then pans down to the side-view you end up with. If you do that it actually feels like you're moving "through" the ground and into this open other-dimensional underground spiritual place

That's what pretty much what I had in mind after watching the transition.  But if the camera only fades out, then it'd be easy to assume, that the Underworld is literally below ground level.  So, I would also use some other transition effect to show that you are also moving to another dimension. Perhaps changing color palette as .  Perhaps inverting colors or using a limited color palette but still different from the Underworld's color palette to make that distinction.  This way, it'd be more apparent that a major transition is taking place.  Another possibility is to add spacial distortion the image  e.g. wavy lines to enhance the transition even more.

[Greipur]

Here's the new transition, Christoffer tells me that we need to make a smooth transition with code, he could animate the camera in the underworld pretty smoothly, but yeah, needs some polish with the help of one of our programmers.

[...]that the Underworld is literally below ground level.

According to the beliefs of several traditional African religions that's what it actually is/was. Literally underground, that is. In that belief system I think it makes a lot of sense, you bury a corpse and the ancestor sinks down into the underworld.

[JobLeonard]

Much better! I'm sure it can still be polished, but this is already a great improvement IMO!

[io3 creations]

Much better! I'm sure it can still be polished, but this is already a great improvement IMO!

I agree.

Oddly enough, in the previous version I didn't notice with star looking lights in the sky but in the current version it seems like a night sky.  I mean, it feels like as if I'm looking at the scene from Earth and not the Underworld.  Maybe a different type of light pattern could distinguish it more.  At least for me.

[Greipur]

Thanks people! I'll think about that, io3. I'm pretty fine with the moonlight feeling, but we'll see.

We've a new artist intern now called Josefine and she'll stay here for 6 months, we're really lucky to have such an opportunity. Sadly I'm swamped with work due to this and other factors such as a big investor meetup soon. I'll see if I can get another update going next week on here.

But at least I can tell you that we'll release the new update on the 2nd December!

[Greipur]

Been busy with finishing up on the Ancestors update, currently I'm working on a new trailer, so I haven't had much time to post here, hopefully I'll have a better posting rate in January!


Here's one new gif though which shows the chronicler interface, the spiral needs some work but otherwise pretty much done.

Just a week left now, I'll try and post the new trailer and info about the update next week.

[Greipur]

Update and trailer is now online!









My New Year's resolution is that I'll post more on the TIG forum in 2017. 

[JobLeonard]

Are you implying this is your last 2016 update?

[Greipur]

Are you implying this is your last 2016 update?

It seems like this is not the case, anymore. We're spending next week with bug fixes and then we'll take a well earned rest for two weeks. In January we'll start with planning our Exploration module. I really don't think I've much to talk about before then.