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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsETHERBORN - 3D Gravitational Exploration Platformer - CROWDFUNDING ON FIG!
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Author Topic: ETHERBORN - 3D Gravitational Exploration Platformer - CROWDFUNDING ON FIG!  (Read 14578 times)
foofter
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« Reply #40 on: March 17, 2017, 07:16:16 AM »

Mesmerizing and stunning art style! I just wanna explore the world! Love the orange spindly mushrooms in particular for some reason. Smiley
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Sentionaut
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« Reply #41 on: March 17, 2017, 01:33:31 PM »

Love the look and feel of this... especially since switching to baked lighting, it really looks physical, tactile.

Great idea using Legos to hash out level design ideas too Wink

Have you considered using ProBuilder and possibly SEGI for prototyping?

[...]

Not cheap, and I'm not sure how well any of that would carry over into your workflow, but it's very satisfying to be able to do rapid prototyping in-engine.

Looking forward to playing this -- will it be on Steam, or are you leaning toward XBox One exclusive?

Hi! Thanks for the kind words! Smiley

We actually have ProBuilder, and my mate @jaketa uses it for some prototypes. He has told me many times how fast and easy it is, but I'm very used to designing and modeling levels in 3DS, so I always forget to check it out  Embarrassed. One of these days...

I didn't know SEGI! It looks stunning, but I have some worries about the performance. Have you used it? If so, how does it perform? Unity doesn't seem to be very efficient at indexing vertices, so processing realtime lights can have a huge impact on the CPU... Specially in a low-poly game, where you don't want to use any smoothing groups, it's easy to end up with a very high vertex count when adding lights. On PC this isn't usually a big deal, since Unity is very optimized for this platform, but on consoles it's another story...

Maybe it's too soon to say anything, but at this point we don't have any exclusivity plans. PC is definitely in mind Smiley


Mesmerizing and stunning art style! I just wanna explore the world! Love the orange spindly mushrooms in particular for some reason. Smiley

Thanks! :D
« Last Edit: March 17, 2017, 02:49:56 PM by Sentionaut » Logged

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« Reply #42 on: March 22, 2017, 08:58:37 AM »

We've started using the Colorful Fog asset to make more interesting fogs, since it's quite a vital element in our art. It's not as flexible as I thought, since gradings always occur vertically. I'd like to be able to create horizontal gradients, or make some particular spots use a different color, but oh well. There's an option for using a cube map instead, but that's more work and I won't have such direct control over the final result without some trial and error. Anyway, for simple scenes like the overworld, which has a very obvious ground, it does the job fine.
Here you can see what I've done (I've tried to make it subtle):









Also, I've been experimenting in a new scenery making two layers of fog, combining Unity's script with Colorful. I don't think I'll leave it like this once the level is done, but results are interesting...



At this moment I'm trying different models for the bridges, since their design has to be flexible enough for certain paths underneath them.
« Last Edit: April 18, 2018, 02:14:29 AM by Sentionaut » Logged

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« Reply #43 on: March 23, 2017, 10:02:14 AM »

GOTTA GO FAST

« Last Edit: April 18, 2018, 02:14:42 AM by Sentionaut » Logged

TonyManfredonia
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« Reply #44 on: March 24, 2017, 05:01:16 AM »

Sonic references = A+ hahahah!

Looking good Smiley
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acatalept
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« Reply #45 on: March 24, 2017, 12:20:33 PM »

I didn't know SEGI! It looks stunning, but I have some worries about the performance. Have you used it? If so, how does it perform?

I have not used SEGI, changed gears away from Unity a while back to spend time in Unreal Engine.  According to the SEGI dev thread:

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/segi-fully-dynamic-global-illumination.410310/

It's still very beta, and probably won't be ready for deployment in a finished game anytime soon, and even then will likely only be for beefier PCs and *maybe* DirectX 11 consoles such as XBox One (i.e., will probably never work on mobile or PS4).  But for prototyping in-engine, it looks functional enough to be a huge boon to visualizing while iterating level design before spending time on baking lightmaps.

I don't mean to sound like a realtime global illumination evangelist (OK, sorry, I am), but I think those baked lightmap shots of yours are just so much nicer than those with standard lighting, flat shadows, no AO, etc.

Please take all this as IMHO, carry on as you were Wink

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« Reply #46 on: March 28, 2017, 09:20:21 AM »

@amanfr01

Thanks! Smiley

@acatalept
I've been trying the SEGI low-poly demo with different values. I'm not sure it can be useful for me, but it certainly looks nice! Thank you!  Grin
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« Reply #47 on: May 10, 2017, 11:34:14 AM »

Well, there's one more level in the game now. There's still work to do with the cameras and art, but the overall design is set since a couple of weeks ago. Right now I'm making some of the stuff I had in mind for the art, while doing tests with the lights. I'll have to improve readibility and how details are distributed, but it's starting to look fine. I'm using two fogs, bloom, sun shafts (the regular ones included in Unity) and SSAO. I haven't applied any color correction yet, and I think that might help a lot.

I've been using metallic maps in this level to fake tiled surfaces on the bridges, in order to ensure that the vertex count doesn't get too high (the hexagonal tiles are modeled because I wanted a different size and feel - and the camera will get closer on certain spots). I'll probably make a GIF showing how it actually looks in movement one of these days.







« Last Edit: April 18, 2018, 02:15:03 AM by Sentionaut » Logged

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« Reply #48 on: April 10, 2018, 01:23:04 AM »

Well, it sure has been some time since our last update! To start posting more info here again, I wanted to quickly write about one of the aspects we're improving at the moment.

Until now, we had just a few animations for the character, mainly around the basic states of idle-moving-jumping. Specifically about the movement, we had a simple Blend Tree with 3 motions inside: walking, running and sprinting. This way, we had a nice simple blend between these three states.

However, just with this the movement of the character feels very rigid. We had always felt that way, but now we decided to redo all our current animations and start addind new ones. Besides improving the animations to better match the feel of the game, we're adding new control parameters for turns and receptions.

The first new approach we've taken for this is to add new BlendTrees for each movement state (walk-run-sprint) where we blend between a left-center-right animation. We have one parameter that depends on the player speed, and a new one that depends on the direction and "magnitude" of the turns.


(I guess a similar result could be achieved using 2D BlendTrees?)

And this is the current result. First we see the old movement behaviour, and second the new animations while turning.



The new animations are still WIP so they still look rough, but we feel that just adding this control for the turning direction already gives a more organic and satisfying feel to the movement of the character.

On top of this we're adding Mask Layers so that we can have some extra details, like simulating falling from a certain height while running (moving the arms differently and crouching the top part of the body a bit) or receiving damage.

We'll post again about this on a following update!
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Sentionaut
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« Reply #49 on: April 19, 2018, 09:00:01 AM »

Hmm, it seems I never got to show how that yellow level ended up looking.

But before that, I just want to note that we’ve changed our logo AND our trailer. I’ve been using Hero font until now, but for the new logo I wanted to make something from scratch. You can see it in our first post, above our new trailer.
Also, we now have a Steam page, so you can wishlist Etherborn right now!

And now, let’s go to the screenshots. These areas are exactly the same from the previous post, although with a little bit of extra work :D




For this level, I’ve faked a bit the flat-poly look on the tiles, because I don’t want to saturate the CPU with excessive geometry calculations (which happens more easily than it seems), so the reflections are actually made with a metallic map for the standard shader.

At first, I created a flat mesh composed of tris with different materials that would reflect light slightly differently, but it just seemed like a waste. To polish it more, I rendered the UVs of that mesh and used as a template to fill with different gray values. Lastly, I optimized the geometry and applied the texture, achieving exactly the same result with less vertices.
However, hexagonal tiles are actually modelled in 3D, because I wanted to go for a more irregular and “ruined” look on them, and neither normal maps nor relief maps gave the same result (and I tried… but this art style requires sharp shapes, and textures tend to give softer results). There’s also a certain spot in the level where the camera gets closer to the character, so this floor is particularly nice there.


I’ve done different patterns for each floor, and it looks fine. It’s also important to scatter around some 3D tiles to make it look more consistent. We should take special care of the edges. The human eye gives priority to the edges of an object, so if you don’t take care of them, models will look flat. Here, everything is in an ambiguous semi-ruined state, so reserving the geometry for irregular tiles placed on the edges works well. However, note that the images have been scaled down for this post, probably making those irregularities look too subtle:


Ok, in theory, some things were working, but there was a problem: the direction of light. In Etherborn, the player can face many different angles, but light comes only from one, so you won’t actually see reflections most of the time unless you’re facing the “correct” spot. The easiest solution is to place point lights all through the level, but that’s also a waste of calculations (and work time). What I did is actually a pretty common solution I believe, but I had to learn it by myself, like almost everything else in the game.


I just painted a simple test cubemap with gradients in Photoshop and made a reflection probe with it. I tried making different reflection probes for each segment of the level, and also making just one for the whole space. However, the cubemap texture scaled accordingly to the size of the probe and the clear bands wouldn’t look as I wished. Final solution: I created a cubic probe with a size proportional to the camera’s far plane and made it its child. The only “problem” is that, even if the probe follows the camera, the texture doesn’t rotate (I guess that should be done by code). Fortunately, it doesn’t bother me too much.


This level is a bit inspired by Giorgio de Chirico (although it also contains some traces of Zdzisław Beksiński), and there’s different reasons for this. Regarding art, I like the feel his paintings give, like if time had been suspended in a specific moment forever. Ideal for a place where people just have to relax and adapt to the mechanics at their own pace, right?
On the level design side, he used a lot of simple architectural elements, and within them we can find many arched buildings. Those buildings make me think of Roman bridges and aqueducts, like the ones we have in Spain (and Italy, of course – Chirico was Italian).


However, I needed to add some big crossbeams for level design purposes and I didn’t want to be excessive with the details either. In the end, I made them more modern, perhaps with a brutalist touch.

But, why was it so necessary to add this type of building? Well, a bridge is a pretty recognizable construction and it’s already in our collective unconscious (almost every culture has built bridges somewhere), making it for a perfect piece to play around showing the gravity mechanics. Everybody knows how a bridge is used, so if you see it in a game, you’ll cross it without asking yourself many questions. But here, when you reach a second one, you switch gravity and end up walking on its side. This way, people get a sense of surprise and they can orient themselves within the game’s space better than if we were already introducing them into purely abstract designs (which will be present later on in the game). We can also use this for the opposite: if we place a group of bridges in unusual ways and with unnatural relations between them (one vertical, another one crossing horizontally between its pillars, etc), players will feel lost, even if we make a linear path.

And, once the main mechanics have become clear, we want people to feel lost. Because Etherborn is, after all, about finding your way through life.
« Last Edit: April 19, 2018, 12:30:46 PM by Sentionaut » Logged

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« Reply #50 on: May 09, 2018, 10:07:19 AM »

Hello everybody!

There’s some updates regarding the development of Etherborn. The first one is we’re bringing Etherborn not only to PC and Xbox, but also PS4 and Switch! The second one is that, in order to do so, we’re running a crowdfunding campaign on Fig. It went public some days ago, and we’re currently on 47%. If you’re interested in seeing Etherborn on consoles, you can make a pledge, and/or share it on your social media. We need your help to make this happen Smiley

Link: Fig.co/Etherborn

Also: in case you’re curious about how the game actually plays, we’ve made a Let’s Play video where we show the basics of Etherborn. We’ll see more mechanics in the game, but I believe the core is summed up pretty well here.





I hope you enjoyed the video. If you have any kind of feedback, please let us know!
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