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[CullenCoyote]

Ha! I saw this on the Indie Game Developers facebook page, looks sweet!  I love the physics, looks like it feels really natural 

[DrWDSo]

Starting to work on jump physics. I will need to add some additional animations for mid-air and landing, to add some weight to the driver.

[cloudgods]

whoa i love how your wind/vertex shader looks! it's really interesting to see a little bit of the process for that. the tilt shift focus is really nice with your visual aesthetic O: cool stuff!

[Scifa]

Starting to work on jump physics. I will need to add some additional animations for mid-air and landing, to add some weight to the driver.

Love it! Have you though about having the bike break on heavy impacts?

[DrWDSo]

Love it! Have you though about having the bike break on heavy impacts?

Yes, we do. However for the time being the bike model does not really support breaking apart... will have to fix/recreate a few things.

[DrWDSo]

Hey there! Ive just registered only because i saw your project and it seems very pretty. (...)

Hey vzdrjni,
sorry for not answering your post for such a long time - somehow we missed it and thanks for registering only because of our project.

To answer your questions:

• There will be jumps of course, but probably based on the environment not active bunny hops... like the ones I showed a few posts before.
• Different weather conditions are also planned. Currently different surface types are implemented, which should support snow for instance. Changing weather conditions are not supported at the moment, but maybe we will try that - it might give some additional variety to the gameplay.
• The driver will crashing when driving backwards! I am currently working (again) on the crash conditions, which is a bit more tricky than expected for some edge cases and combinations you mentioned (like landing with highspeed on mud). But in general you will crash a lot in the game - don't worry.
• I like the idea of holding on to the handle bar, might give some funny moments!
• We are too early in production to decide on a price, but I am pretty sure it won't be free.

(...) Looking forward to hear an answer or any news. Btw sorry for my english - im not native speaker.
Greetings from Ukraine, sir 

Don't worry, your english is good enough. Thanks again! 

[DrWDSo]

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.

Good point about the miniature style and the weather - maybe the weather effects could match the scale? Will try that once I get to the weather - right now I am happy its sunny outside so I don't want to create rain.
Making the sounds support the miniature look is also a great idea. 

[bombjack]

It looks very nice and polished. Great!

[DrWDSo]

Again only a small update. Improved the randomization of the terrain a little bit so that it looks less regular. However sometimes too small edges and faces are created, so I will have tweak that a little bit.

Meanwhile I am working on the level connections. Each section of the long track is in an extra Unity scene and to stitch those seamlessly together we need some editor tools, to avoid going back and forth all the time.

[eobet]

This caused me to come out of my cave, because I have to say that this looks really cool.

I'm hoping it will control nicely, and with that little sliding mechanic I spy things seem promising!

[DrWDSo]

This caused me to come out of my cave, because I have to say that this looks really cool.

I'm hoping it will control nicely, and with that little sliding mechanic I spy things seem promising!

Thanks! We are currently working on the controls again, trying to improve the cornering behavior of the bike - especially on steeper parts of the track that's quite tricky.

[DrWDSo]

Hey everybody,

sorry for not posting updates for some time now, some contract work kept me busy the last weeks.
I just wrote another (very) small part to the "LowPoly Terrain" series on our blog.



Also - if you haven't seen the other posts yet - check out part 1 and part 2 if you are interested.

Some work also went into the level connection system. Now we can easily edit sections of the whole track and match them to the adjacent sections, thus quickly iterate on the tracks. I will post some images of that later this week. 

[DrWDSo]

We started thinking about the jumping and landing animations to feedback the impact a little bit more. Here you can see some tests:



What's on our "let's-see-how-that-looks"-list for that?

• some kind of prepare for landing animation / pose
• screenshake on impact
• particles on impact
• subtile squash & stretch

What do you think? Anything missing?

[MereMonkey]

Looks great fun haha 

[DrWDSo]

Hey everybody, sorry for being so quiet for such a long time. We spend a lot of time working on level editor tools and figuring out how we can manage to focus more on the project and how to proceed.

We finally got a name for the project (yeah, about time!), so we updated the first post and added a new screenshot and a gif. We hope you like it! 

[DrWDSo]

Less than two weeks!

That's the time left until we will showcase the game at the Quo Vadis conference for three days and the Amaze Festival here in Berlin. It's the first public showcase ever for that game - so we are super excited, but also a bit nervous!

With the new level editor and path tools Daniel is working on a set of demo levels. We are aiming for a 5-10 minute demo (depending on your skills), so everybody can get bit of a feeling for the game. Besides fixing bugs and polishing what we have, I am working on additional camera controls, which allows us to create a more cinematic and dynamic camera at certain parts of the level and to ensure the player is always visible.

This following scene was created to see where we might go and how our assets look like in the game. The camera perspective will still be top down, so although this is ingame it is not the normal perspective while playing:



Click for highres:


Also check out the new images in the first post of this thread if you haven't!

Cheers,
   Jan

[DrWDSo]

Wow, what a week! We showed the game for the first time in public during "International Games Week Berlin" for the last days and we are super happy with the feedback! Probably more than 100 people played the game and seeing them actually having fun is so rewarding right now. It's especially great to see that the controls and core gameplay works out. We received so many new ideas and feature request we now will process and think about what makes sense to implement.

The first speed run battles were super fun to watch and reached best times we have no clue how to achieve them ourself (probably I will spend the next week training )!

For the last day we added a crash counter, counting all the fatal bike crashes and at the end of the day we had 1160 crashes, but not a single game crash!

[DrWDSo]

Hey there!

As mentioned above we had a really good time showing the PC version of the game for the first time in public last week, although being rather nervous before. But hey, everything went well and now we are super motivated to keep on working on it.

Starting at the top of the mountain...

But we also learned a lot about our own game so here is a short post mortem.
 
What went right?

• Game feel: The most important thing worked out! We wanted to achieve a good mix between an arcade action racing game but still having a „bike-ish“ downhill feeling to it and that worked really well. People really like the controls, physics and animation system and had a lot of just playing around with it.
• The art style: People really seem to like the art style, which is good as we weren’t sure if we would hit the right match between having a low poly look but still lot of vegetation details but it seems we hit the sweet spot. We were really worried about that because neither of us has a background in art direction.
• The level design: We tried to have a guided level design on the one hand with clearly visible paths so that people don’t get lost on their way but still having the opportunity for lots of shortcuts and ways to go cross-country. This worked out pretty well and people had lots of fun to find the craziest ways down the mountain.

Follow the main path or take risky shortcuts

What went wrong?

• Controls/Tutorial: Almost all people liked the controls, as soon as they understood how they work. However some people had different expectations, so often there was a slight confusions at the beginning and the tutorial didn’t really help. That’s one of the things we definitely need to improve.
• Large obstacles in front of the camera: Sometimes people managed to get stuck behind a large object and couldn’t see what was going on anymore. We’re not sure how we will solve it but the current design leads to some not-so-nice moments. Possible solutions we will investigate would be fading out / transparent objects or additional camera logic to avoid this.
• You can’t turn on the spot: When you manage to brake just in front of an obstacle or the edge of a cliff there is no way to turn on the spot at the moment so you just have to crash to reset to the last checkpoint. We definitely need to fix that.
• Physics bugs: Mostly we’re pretty happy with our custom physics system but often people managed to jump through rocks and although it’s sometimes funny we would rather like to fix that, especially since it creates a certain unpredictability.
• Checkpoint distances: Some checkpoints are too far away from each other and crashing against the last tree and starting anew is too frustrating on some sections.

Jump, slide and race

What was unexpected?

• Speed runs: We knew that the game would be nice for speed runs but I think we underestimated how many people would do it even on a business conference. We had one guy doing a best-time 10 seconds better than we as developer and we still haven’t managed to beat that yet…
• Ghosts: We always thought being able to ride against you own ghosts and other people’s as a nice to have feature but it was probably the thing most people wished for so we will definitely make it a much higher priority.
• Content: We actually planned to have much bigger mountains than the one we did for the showcase but we now think that the current length is already sufficient. We will change the plan in doing more mountains but having shorter track lengths for each one.
• Generous physics: At the moment our physics are pretty generous when it comes to surviving large jumps from high places and we always felt that it’s too unrealistic but people had a lot of fun trying to make insane jumps so we will probably just keep it that way.

... all the way to the valley!

What will be next?

We don’t really know yet. We have applied to a state funding here in Berlin which would allow us to develop the game full time but we won’t know if we get that until the end of the month.

Gameplay-wise there are still some things we would like to try - especially giving people more control during jumps and also some way to make tricks but without making the core gameplay more complex.

We’re also thinking about doing a Kickstarter for the game in September. What do you think? Could a Kickstarter work?

[Hellfish]

Hey there,

just a short update: We're now on IndieDB and we wrote a more in-depth article about the feature-set of the game:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/lonely-mountains-downhill

I also wondered if you can recommend any other (PC) community websites to which we should add the game?

We're also experimenting with some new marketing artworks/screenshots. What do you think of this one?



Have a good start into the week!

[Hellfish]

Hey fellow indie devs!

Some good news! Our game just went live on Greenlight and we also have a new trailer.
We would really appreciate any help we can get. If you have any feedback for the campaign - please let us know.

Please vote here: www.lonelymountains.com/#Greenlight