Hi all!

I have to apologize for the long silence. The first half of 2016 (ironically directly after my post) was a very busy time (full time job). I wasn’t able to move forward as fast as I would have liked. Gladly the 2nd half of the year turned out to be more productive.

• I changed the theme of the page and added some overall freshness to it where the old one was lacking.
• I improved the aiming system. As you can play in third person the center of the screen is not necessarily the point where the gun is pointing. This has to be addressed by moving the camera or the crosshair.
• I spend some time to enhance the procedural quest system: I build an editor tool to test and optimize the system, implemented network functionality, connected it with all required managers to turn quests physical (e.g. spawn stuff) and plugged it into the new dialog system.

• Next I replaced the old debug inventory GUI with Unity’s new UI system. As the whole GUI is split into ‘logic’ and ‘design’ classes it’s (theoretically) simple to just change the visual implementation. This was the very first test case. Over the years I have learned one thing – never underestimate the troubles a GUI can get you in! This time I tried to keep it clean and structured right from the beginning. I’m really glad it worked out so well (for now)!
• I switched to various new Unity versions (currently 5.5.2), implemented the new post processing stack, added screen space shadows and a shadow filtering solution.

• Then I reached a very important milestone: the implementation of the first AI agent. It’s currently just a strange arrow-head statue but there’s a lot of technology hidden behind it. This includes:
  • A* Pathfinding (for more information you might want to try this wonderful online example or read some theory on Wikipedia)
  • Path smoothing (if you’re interested check out this Gamasutra article for example)

• Path gridding (this is how I call the method of constructing all possible path nodes from which the pathfinder can chooses from)
• Collision avoidance (based on the ORCA logic – read more about it on this page from the University of North Carolina)
• AI behaviors (I’m using Behavior Designer. The system is based on the way Halo2 did part of it’s AI. Again, you can read more about it on Gamasutra)

Last but not least there’s an important change: since January I’m working full time on the game. Not only does it speed up the development process but also allows me to focus more on whatever I’m working on.

That’s it for the moment. I’ll go into more detail regarding some of the above topics in future posts.

Until then, thx for reading, do well and cu soon! (and this time a lot sooner)

Bla bla bla: a procedural quest system

This is something I wanted to build from the very beginning. I often missed some kind of a story or long time goals while playing open world – survival – sandbox games. Even though procedural story systems fall short in terms of quality and soul they are perfect in throwing out quantity. Now what I don’t want to create is some kind of bring-me-10-bla-of-blabla quests machine. What I’m aiming for has more similarity to something like a road map: a system which gives the player a good reason to travel to certain regions of the world. A paper chase maybe. It should generate an unique journey each time you start a new game.

At least that’s the plan! A basic system is already running. It allows me to test the interaction with the environment manager and experiment with different ways of constructing short and clear (grammatically correct) sentences out of simple text modules.

IK or not IK – or: should we use third party assets?

With the help of FinalIK I implemented the weapon aiming. Unity has a built-in IK system but FinalIK is simply better. It made me able to quickly add some additional features I normally wouldn’t have implemented. Why? Because they fall into the nice-to-have section. And there are many entries in there. Core elements first! But that makes me even happier if some make it into the game from time to time.

So, why should I use third party tools anyway? Well, they help out where Unity is lacking in functionality or quality. Most stuff I use extends the Editor. Just a minority ends up in-game. I try to keep it to the absolute minimum because it’s always a trade off: You gain time but loose control. It’s more likely that I use a third party extension if it just makes the game shine a bit more without being a hassle when it has to be removed. What I don’t do is use them for game mechanics like the described quest system or anything which would end up deep in the engine. Only exception: the network engine Bolt where it’s simply impossible to keep the integration shallow.

Guns, Lots of Guns

Now to something important. Not that I think guns are important per se but the game mechanic is. Implementing the complete functionality to hold, aim and fire “a tool which throws objects” was not a small task. But it did turn out to be quite interesting! For example watching a cliché American ex marine (yes, he’s the one from Full Metal Jacket) telling surprisingly interesting details about gun history and physics accompanied with beautiful slow motion shots. A perfect reference.

It’s blue light…

So as we’ll dig, run and fight through many dark caves and tombs we might want to be able to see where we are before getting killed. One very effective way to do so is to use – light.

A few days ago when I was writing the first paragraph of this article I realized I didn’t had a proper night in game to showcase lights. I had to expanded the environment manager to support a real day-night circle with changing sun color and intensity and stars for Unity’s procedural skybox shader.  But I made it! I made the game dark. What a hell of a developer I am.

There will exist various ways how to utilize light and I made sure to go with deferred rendering and HDR lighting to be able to draw enough brightly glowing lights on screen to support that goal. The different light values (color, brightness, ‘fuel’, etc.) should have an significant effect on gameplay. The most obvious is of course… being able to see something.

And now for something completely different…

There are more things I’m working on but they’re hard to showcase or need some more polish. Anyhow: 2016 is going to be an exciting year with a lot of cool stuff coming up.

I’ll keep you updated!

Hi everyone!

After more than one year of development I’m done with the biggest part of the underlaying engine (on top of unity of course). Most of the time was spend with programming but I also redid the player model and the mecanim system, built some new props, switched to normalmapped and tesselated world textures (if this is not going to kicking me in the back one day…), switched completely to PBS, deffered rendering, linear workflow and implemented most of the image effects I need.

I’m already quite happy with the look of game and over the next months further finetuning will bring it even closer. It’s always difficult to decide how to split the time between code and art but it’s dangerous to let one fall back too far. Turned out it was a good mix so far.

Next to come: some ingame footage.