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[electrolyte]

Dropping by to post a last 2015 dev update.

Been learning so much about light baking and modelling over the last few months, feel very under qualified but keep plugging away. Been interesting to see how it's progressed from it's early prototype version. With the new findings its meant I've had to  re-look at how the game is structured and have now split it into 5 chapters. This means 5 scenes within Unity and 5 light bakes. This is a good thing as to bake the entire ship was taking silly amounts of time (1+ day)

Corridors had had a re-model and habitation and cargo areas were redesigned from scratch. Overall it's been a good learning year for getting my head around Unity, hope to release this soon ... ahem 

Happy New Year fellow 'Tiggers'

[electrolyte]

The size of the ICARUS.1 has been starting to get out of hand, you can see glimpses of it in earlier posts. Because I’d moved a large chunk of the lighting to being Baked this meant long waits to see results, in the end I was setting up bakes to run over night.

Being a visual guy, the temptation to want to see baked results started to slow development to a crawl. Over the Christmas brake I bit the bullet and decided to split the ship into chunks or Unity scenes. This makes things far more manageable with scenes taking at the most a hour to bake.

The ICARUS.1 is now split into 5 chapters. The original prototype is 3 but was one complete scene. Its actually come with some benefits as it’s help to build and flesh out the story around these 5 key splits.

Talking of stories, a new addition and has been added with the ICARUS.1 now having an A.I. character!

Slowly moving towards a beta release …

[electrolyte]

Some work in progress on the cargo area. Weaving in puzzles both environmental and mechanical. Having to work out how to make all the different sounds as they add so much to the overall feel. Since splitting the game into five chapters its really helped to focus the little dev times I manage to snap up here and there.

This big area will start to introduce the player to more of the ICARUS.1 and in particular the fate of the crew.

[electrolyte]

Slowly chipping away. Had to do quite a big rewrite to the interaction routines. Previously I was using this kind of brute force detection to see if a player was looking at something by using an invisible 'stick' pointing out the players head. Fine in theory but not very precise when you have overlapping hit areas.

After some rethinking Ive changed this to using a ray cast. This gets around any problems of overlapping hit areas as rays are halted when they reach a hit area.

The game is now split into 5 chapters and I've rolled out this across chapter 1, along with visual and audio changes. My plan is to possibly release it episodically just to help me keep motivation.

Here are some recent screens - for screen shot Saturday!

[electrolyte]

After a lot of blood, sweat, tears and nearly a year of dev -
Chapter 1 Demo now released!  



http://icarus1.com/_download/

Getting this into the wild to gather feedback and if it even runs on other machines.
PC only at the moment.
I have no idea how to bench mark it, so if you get it to run on a lower spec please let me know, or if you have problems with the minimum spec again please let me know! :D

[electrolyte]

Some more shots. Also starting the process of moving it all onto Steam with the aim of using the Beta keys as the main delivery.

http://icarus1.com/_download/

[electrolyte]

ICARUS.1 Demo is now live on Steam, you can play through the first Chapter.

store.steampowered.com/app/395470



Work is continuing on the other 4 chapters. Chapter 2 is nearly complete, just putting the last finishing touches to it. It contains the habitation zones and workshops. Below is a quick screen grab of the lounge area. Got some momentum now, need to finish this in the next few months, baby number two is on it's way! 

[and]

Oh I missed this with all the Kickstarter stuff going on - I'll check it out when I get chance, was looking forward to trying it out

[hyperduck]

Same  but it is looking GOOOOD! 

[electrolyte]

The long pause ... !



Been chipping away over the last few weeks trying to find time to dev around full time work and family duties. The above screenshot is what I’ve been starring at for ages now. This is the main puzzle from Chapter 3 and has involved a fair amount of working out. On the plus side it’s meant that I now understand ray casting which helps players interactions across the entire game. In a nutshell the puzzle consists of a big lazer, some terminals and lots of mirrors … on pistons.

I’ve also been working on a ‘Journal log’ display that collects together discovered story fragments and allows you to re-read them at your own leisure in chronological order.



A good point was mentioned that if you can only carry one item then puzzles will become very linear (which they are at present)
Solution is to introduce a back pack / pocket. You will now be able to pick up and store items. If you are interacting with an item that needs something you are holding, it will automatically be taken out of your pocket and shown as the item you are carrying.

Having just got this working it feels good … also means there can be much harder puzzles!
Will spend some time this weekend rolling it out across all the Chapters.

Will finish off with a photo from some concept art I'm working on :D

[electrolyte]

Another quick update.

So development was progressing slowly due to the constant need to light bake all the shadows. This meant my PC was locked up for hours for things to render and then test. It also meant that everything I moved I'd need to think long and hard about summing up if it was worth the hours spent light baking. As you can imagine, this was a slow process and has been for many months.

Recently I discovered the 'deferred rendering pipeline'.

The what??

With newer graphics cards, within the last 6 years [sic], the deferred rendering mode can be taken advantage of and eliminate the need for light baking, instead all lighting is done in real time! (insert party popper here) There is also a slight increase hit on the CPU but I think will hopefully be nominal.

After some consideration I've decided to go down this route as I (and I'm sure many of you) would like to get ICARUS.1 completed sooner rather than later. The new lighting mode also allows for some exciting new game play features and mood setting. On top of this I've added SSR (Screen space reflections) a new AA filter and have overhauled the Bloom Amorphic lighting effects.

Chapter 4 is half way complete and story writing is being done in parallel.

Thanks for reading, I'll update the Demo of Chapter 1 to the new rendering mode shortly so you can see what I'm so excited about. Here's a few new screen shots in the new rending mode to wet your appetite.

:D





And finally the overused starting crippled scout pod (in the new rendering mode)

[electrolyte]

It's been a while but I've managed to update the live demo with the new lighting mode using Deferred rending.
You can grab it now on the steam page here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=452914283

Also in this update are the additions of a journal which gathers terminal's that you've read in one handy place. A random litter spawner has been added to help populate levels and there's also a couple of surprises added to chapter 1 to look out for.



Head back down finishing the rest of the chapters ...

[electrolyte]

 



 

Finally! Next week, 17 November 2016 it's out.
I can not wait to see this out there as it's been such a struggle.

[The Armorman]

does the ship perform some scientific research and then a bad thing happens to the crew 

[JOHNMCLAY]

KKKEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Been following Icarus1 since the beginning and I cannot wait to experience it! 

[electrolyte]

Tomorrow!