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[mattrified]

http://mattrifiedgames.blogspot.com/2016/04/project-merfight-devlog-01.html

I wrote a blog post about my new project.  Here are some .gifs.  







The best way for me to describe the gameplay is that it is a tactics rpg with a fighting game influenced battle system.

The theme involves merfolk and a brash adventurer in her early 20's named Gigi.

I'll do a better job logging about it in the future.

[mattrified]

Got a new character in.  His name is Atlas; he's shark-inspired.

[mattrified]

I may be able to say I have more than 10% done now!  I've been working on this for awhile and have made a lot of progress.  Most of it is under the hood and definitely has a bit of a one step forward, two steps back feel.  I definitely feel I bit off a bit more than I can chew with this project.  Hopefully, if I can get the main flow working, it'll most rest on content -- which will still take a long time.

Firstly, for ease of use in posting in places like Twitter, I made a design presentation that goes into some of this information in more detail.:









Here's some .gifs of minor UI progress as well.

[mattrified]

Doing an art style experiment.
There's still a good amount of work that needs to be done.


I'm trying not to use normal maps because high-poly sculpting and retopo is out of my skill set, so I'm trying to find an interesting toon shaded look.

I'm thinking of adding something so the ears / eyebrows have a little bounce using dynamic bones or maybe vertex offset through the shader.  I haven't decided yet.

[mattrified]

And I decided to add that little bounce; it helps a lot imo:

[mattrified]

Still a lot to do.  I experimented a bit more with the character visuals.  I tried doing an underwater caustic shader.  I didn't hate it, but I wasn't really in love either:


The idea is that the planet's atmosphere is made of water so when you look up, it always looks like the sun, etc., is being refracted; however, I also tried skybox experiments with this that were turning nightmarish.  I did get a nice way for a texture to be projected onto a skybox without looking like it's being mirrored, but the effect still wasn't great.

I also got the characters into the main tactics part of the game (instead of small capsules like before)


The biggest struggle I focused on was environments.  I've never been strong at environment modeling, so I tried to find shortcuts in creating mine.  I eventually found one in triplanar shaders.  I'm not 100% sure if I'll use this approach in the final version, but for now, it's a nice way to conceptually visualize the type of texture I want in the environment, its shape, layout, etc.






Also, if you're using ShaderForge in Unity3D, here's what my shader looks like:



This allows for localized triplanar projection.

My next goal will be combining a new environment into the main game and transitioning between the strategy part and the fighting part without the need of a loading screen.