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[alvarop]

This looks like it could be very fun. The movement looks nice, fluid and believable. tracking

[I_smell]

I've been commenting on the facebook updates, this looks like something unique and fun. I hope things are working out well and you can provide fun and interesting things to do in the setting!

[DrWDSo]

A little update...

For screenshotSaturday we played around with some post effects and lighting moods. What do you think about the Depth of Field? Also I am writing on a little blog post about the low poly terrain, but I need to make some graphics first...

[jctwood]

Absolutely love this depth of field, reminds me of trials somewhat but Downhill will have full 3D movement right?

[KevinTillman]

very cool low poly work

[DrWDSo]

Absolutely love this depth of field, reminds me of trials somewhat but Downhill will have full 3D movement right?

Yes, we will have full 3D movement, however it will not focus on tricks & stunts. Actually we are not even sure if manual (arcade) jumping is necessary, but instead focus on some nice drops which will give you the desired air time. Opinions on that?

[jctwood]

I think trying to keep the control scheme simple is a good move, I find myself turned off by games which give you several obscure inputs when movement is fun on its own.

[Christian]

Oh, you made And Then It Rained. That was such a cool little arcade puzzler. Was Twisted Lines released? That looks fun too

[Hellfish]

Thanks Christian! Nice to know that some people still remember the game We're currently finishing Twisted Lines and it will hopefully come out in August.

[oxysoft]

Very nice looking game. Lately, there has been an increasing number of games in development with low poly aesthetic but many of these games end up having no style and character to them because they're just copying a general aesthetic and it ends up being just a easy way out for programmers with little artistic skills but this one has a very nice charm to it. It seems that you are using subtle textures to add character to the solid colors and I think that is a wonderful direction to take, I've never understood myself why so little low poly artists use textures, always just solid colors. What's more, you've managed to make me interested for a game idea that would never convince me that it would be fun on paper. I suggest adding some subtle texturing to the trees and trunks, and perhaps even the rocks too. I'll be following this!

[DrWDSo]

[..] What's more, you've managed to make me interested for a game idea that would never convince me that it would be fun on paper. I suggest adding some subtle texturing to the trees and trunks, and perhaps even the rocks too. I'll be following this!

It took me a while until I was confident that this idea might be fun - actually until we had the first playable prototype. And yes, the trees and rocks have no texture right now, but they definitely need one too. Currently the props are from the asset store, but once we really get going with the level design part, we will add own assets here, which then will have subtle textures too.

[DrWDSo]

We'll probably make the blood optional, since several people mentioned they really would prefer it clean without blood. Although I am not really happy with the crash particles as a whole right now, they still seem a little bit "disconnected".



Meanwhile I am working on the terrain stitching to make seamless progress from one track section to the next possible - not much to show here at the current stage.

[vzdrjni]

 Hey there! Ive just registered only because i saw your project and it seems very pretty. So as a regular gamer i want to ask you to make god damn bunny hop cause its adding much fun in gameplay tho. Another question - is it planned to make different weather conditions? i mean snow or rain that actually makes difference in bike and control behavior. It seems that this game is totally about controling the downhill ride, so adding varieties in gameplay by adding weather stuff seems legit, right?
 Another question - will rider fall from bike if he'll drive backwards? i hope he will. What about different surfaces? like mud, stone, grass will make differences in bike control? Im in love with hardcore, physix and polygons, so i wish there will be a lot of opportunities to fell from the bike, like making game a bit harder. Like bunny hop at high speed has a high chance to crash on landing, and landing on mud/wet surface will make this chance even higher.
And please - could you make that the rider when he fall would keep one hand (or both) holding his handlebar for a bit so he could grab his bike in air for a while. Randomize this like 1/7 of all crashes are going to be this way. Ofcourse if you want to make the game a bit more realistic. 
Is this game gonna be free or if its not - what price will be?
Looking forward to hear an answer or any news. Btw sorry for my english - im not native speaker.
Greetings from Ukraine, sir  

[Scifa]

[watching]

[tjpalmer]

Overall, I like the crashes. An experienced cyclist won't go pure ragdoll, though, so maybe some limited control to the player in a crash might be nice? Or maybe not worth the effort. Just some thoughts.

[Scifa]

I'd don't know, it looks good to me

[GalaethGames]

This looks great!

[DrWDSo]

Sorry for being quiet for some days now. We've been to the Develop:Brighton conference, showing Twisted Lines and the rest of the time I spend on cleaning the project, setting up a git server and more or less boring stuff like that. 

Every now and then I need some time off and do some fun stuff, so I started working on animating the vegetation (for now only trees). We need wind as well as collision animations (basically just shaking). To avoid unnecessary drawcalls, I wanted to set everything to static so static batching can be done. However since I wanted to move/rotate the trees a little bit when the player crashes into them, setting to static won't work.

So I started working on a vertex shader, which deforms the mesh based on some 3D noise. My first step looked something like the left image below. The next step was to control where to apply noise. This was done by defining the areas using vertex colors. After having found this article by Crytek, I adopted their noise generation and modified it to work with our kind of geometry (no individual leafs, lowpoly). The result on the right:



The shader worked fine when not batching the geometry. However it uses the object-space vertex position, which is offset when multiple meshes are combined resulting heavily distored meshes. After some tweaks and modifications I got that working (details later) and this is what it looks like in the game:


Still needs some variation in the wind direction, which is set and animated on the CPU side. What do you think so far?

[oahda]

This game looks super cool!

Not 100% sure about the trees since the style, especially with the depth of field, makes it seem like a miniature, where real weather sort of looks weird, but I think you should stick with it anyway—no movement at all would look even weirder. I do agree with some of the others that blood feels very out of place with this style.

Overall: looks very nice, both graphically and programmatically (physics seem really neat). Don't forget great sound to fit eventually! c: Would be cool with something that fits the miniature-looking style somehow. So nothing too realistic.

[Bravo81]

Hey guys,

I'm loving the progress so far, you've taken such a simple mechanic and it looks stunning. The low poly art style really is working for you too.

I thought I'd reach out and introduce my company Greenlight Games, we're creating a small portfolio of published games and I'd love to help publish yours. We don't just message every game going, we pick ones that stand out.

We've only published one title so far and that was DEUL, it came out in January as a soft release and will be hitting 1 million players this weekend.
http://www.deulgame.co.uk

If you're interested we would advertise this awesome unnamed game via social media, exhibitions & help you get through Steam Greenlight. It would be great to chat more, please message me or fire me an email:
[email protected]

I'm not here to pretend we're a huge publisher but we've done very well so far and I'm sure we could both gain from working together.