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[BeardTopher]

Yay new stuff to show!

Here are the wip character designs that ended up working with our current rig/engine setup:



We like a bunch of them and will probably either get them all in (with shared anims) or smoosh them together to get a nice variety. We're currently working on the next 3D model and should have someone new to show in the next day or two.

In other news we are currently getting in:
• Parallaxing
• Debug bullshit for our benefit  
• A camera dolly system using either a spline, target or path system - still trying to decide which will be most beneficial in the long run.

Also stress tested the grass shader with 400 entities and still getting awesome frame rates:


And got an awesome bug when reprogramming the slide functionality:


Thank you again everyone for all the awesome comments, messages and emails. It means a lot.

[JOHNMCLAY]

Hiraeth looks great! 
The character and world design are love at first sight!  Puts me in mind of Journey by way of Monument Valley.  Character movement looks fun already and even at this early stage the game's looking quite promising.

Can't wait for more!       

[migs]

Journey and Monument Valley are definitely some of the games we've pulled artistic inspiration from, so thank you; it's great to hear we're heading in the right direction!
Aiming to have some more character development stuff up today or tomorrow, cheers for following along 

[migs]

Hey gang! It's after 4am here in Perth; almost time to call it a night.

We've been primarily working on getting the first of the redesigned characters modeled and into engine as you can see below.



We decided to start with this character as we liked the design and the amount of fabric he has serves as a good starting/reference point for working in the other characters.

We threw a simple animation on the model to make sure the cloth system was working. We're still having issues with the cloth and the collider but hope to have that sorted soon. Also featured; first iteration of the pickups/relics/shards.

Also a few additional biome/level concepts we've been working on. Trying to focus on terrain that will allow us to create more complex puzzles whilst maintaining a colour palette that will work with the character designs we posted earlier.



I think it's beer and sleep time for us; cheers for reading!

[Bakuda]

This looks beautiful!  I love the color palate you're using, very inspiring.  Looking forward to seeing this progress.

[boogie]

That's amazing! I'm following. How did you guys make the grass shader? I really like the effect

[BeardTopher]

Cheers everyone

That's amazing! I'm following. How did you guys make the grass shader? I really like the effect

@boogie Check out Lars Bertram's terrain and foliage shaders. Ours is a dumbed down version of his amazing work. You could do the same with shader-forge pretty easily if you don't have much shader programming exp. If you have any questions email or PM me

[boogie]

Thanks for the reference. I checked Lars Bertram's terrain, but the grass only waves in the wind. I really like the way your grass reacts to the character

[inspectorRoar]

That looks great!
I love the look of the characters and the simple environments!
This grass on the stress test looks awesome, you should have some place in the game with that much! (or something else that reacts to the character's movement)

[BeardTopher]

We have done a a lot the last few days.

-warning a bunch of GIF's-

Presenting the first version of the right stick floaty movement:


As you can see the orb now loses energy as you use it and is slowly replenished when you are not leaning on the stick. It also follows you around if you are not putting input in and will go into an idle animation if you are not moving (which is unlikely).

Still a bunch of tweaking but feeling really fun. Mostly a course correction tool and speed boost.

After that we have a the dash:


The only offensive weapon in your inventory, you propel yourself based on your right stick position. This has a separate cooldown and will have its own visual indicator when it is ready or on cooldown. It is also a double edged sword so if you hit the wall/player with shield up/defensive enemy, you will get mini-stunned.

We also got the slide (down on the left stick on ramp/slanted terrain) working well:


This is almost 2 times faster then running.

So using everything together we get some nice movement:


We are really happy with how it is all feeling. It is missing all the juicy particles and fun pretty stuff but the functionality is getting there.

Blocking/Air Breaking is almost done. This is going to be a mostly defensive move but could have a bunch of cool emergent applications. It again will have its own energy/visuals and will resemble the Super Smash Bros shield however it will shrink when being used also (giving you a limited amount over the course of the level).

We also have a simple camera system going now which is cool to test with.
And the parallax is almost where we want it.

Currently working on:
• Animating the new green character (which will be the base for the other chars anims)
• More terrain workflow stuff
• Enemy and hazard/trap designs
• More shaders, effects etc

Thanks again everyone who is interested in our stuff.

[Bakuda]

Nice update.  I'm loving the character movement.  That slide looks really fun.

[BeardTopher]

Yeah it is feeling good.

Might slack off from code and do some particles tonight; so the dash and slide are more readable.

[hyperduck]

Aw man, <3 the movement gifs are giving me goosebumps. I imagine you get quite lost in just testing moving around in this world, I know I would!

[naezith]

love and keep the speed

[blindskystudios]

This is looking very beautiful! Keeping an eye on this one 

[migs]

Hey gang!
Thanks heaps for the kind words; we do sometimes get caught up just playing in the level..I mean purely for testing purposes.
Been busy making some new additions, now available in huge gifs for your viewing pleasure.


Here we've added in a block; the players will be given a limited amount of shield to utilize throughout the level. Each time you use the block you'll be suspended in air but it will slowly drain at your shield. After it fully depletes you will be unable to block. For single and co-op modes this will probably be used more strategically to position yourself, minimise the amount of magic used to reach places and course correct to avoid falling off the screen.


This is a more complete gif of the features thus far:

• added a particle trail to the player dash
• added a subtle wind effect to show the camera's upcoming direction
• added the block mechanic
• added a visual shield indicator of how much block time the player has remaining

We're still working on animating our little green guy and also modelling a new character. Pretty happy with the pipeline for making new terrain so hopefully that will permit us to pump out some of the new level concepts soon!
Cheers for reading!  

[maruki]

Totally hyped for this!
Are you going to add small floating fire/spirit balls for the other characters according to their color schemes?

[thewojnartist]

This looks quite beautiful. I hope to see more of it in  the future!

[BeardTopher]

Totally hyped for this!
Are you going to add small floating fire/spirit balls for the other characters according to their color schemes?

Yeah each characters orb thingy will tie in with their design/colors. Mostly for readability when in versus/co-op mode.

This looks quite beautiful. I hope to see more of it in  the future!

Cheers!

[BeardTopher]

A bit of a "technical" post here.

We are aiming to make our assets as modular/reusable as possible. However as artists first we are idealistic in wanting every level to feel as unique as possible. Conundrum. So we have been coming up with simple ways to reuse stuff that is both functional AND pretty.

So our simple little wind ribbon effect that hints to the player which way the camera/level is heading:


Becomes sadly complex when we decided that it needed to be reusable, easy to setup in scene but also not look the same every time. What we decided was we could get away with 8 different variations and if possible tweak or get some variety in the editor. We also only had around 2 hours designated to the Asset so it had to be quick to make.

We decided straight up looping animations with a switch statement & mecanim controlling it would be a good start. That way we could just tweak the animation play speeds/trail renderer values for some extra variety:


However the trail renderer ended up being the biggest problem. When the animation looped back to its start pos it would leave a huge 1 pixel line as its position reset. We tried turning it on and off with both events and code but it limited our variety.

We ended up handling this by using an animation curve that fed a float that controlled the trails duration:


So as the animation played the float would start short, get longer half way through the anim, then shorter again at the end:


Hopefully that was useful/interesting to someone. We might do more of these in-depth posts amongst the concept art and GIFs when we have the chance.