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Post feature Report RSS The road so far: February 2018

In this feature John talks about what has happened... since February 2017. Art updates, trouble with engine upgrades and 2d pixel lights.

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G’day ladies and mentlegen!

It's John again. It's been a while and I figured, I'd give you a rundown on what happened since february in 2017. Let me tell you. It's not a whole lot compared to the time that has passed.

The most obvious thing would be the update to Unity 2017.x. The graphics guy said we cannot possible ignore this release as it brought so many good stuff we could make great use of in the game. Programmer person on the other hand figured, we should not switch horses mid-race. We went with the graphics guy anyway. Much to the initial displeasure of the programmer person.

upside down

That is just one of the things that happened after upgrading. Of course programmer person was able to fix this in a more or less timely fashion. But then, to my great dismay, it broke the lighting. Remember?

The one that could do those fancy shadows. Programmer person resorted to looting the dead corpse of the broken lighting code and salvage what was still usable. But the dynamic shadows were gone. More on that later.

With the new Unity there came the ability to tile sprites. What's this? You may ask. We have a term to describe it. Expando-Trees.


There were also a lot of changes under the hood. Programmer person worked on the save-games system to make it more robust and fast. That'll allow us to create more complex contraptions that can be saved and restored properly. That's a good thing, I hear.

As you might can see there on that gif, the graphics guy worked on creating more assets and reworking older ones. There are a lot of trees now. Entrance area before and after the refactoring of things:

how to grasshowtograss2


That works a whole lot better than the old trees if you ask me. Not sure if that graphics guy wanted to fool me with those first variant of trees. Maybe I should pay him less still and crack a bigger whip to make him work better. But I digress.

The graphics guy did more than just trees. The mansion outsides have been changed too. And it's not such a bad work either.

mansion 2018


There's still a way to go but we're getting there. As you can see as well, me (John) has been given a new look as well. I will say that I never had a blue jacket and a red pullover or any of that stuff. But graphics guy insisted for "screen readability" reasons. I'm proudly wearing black. Always black. Don't be fooled! Animations have been updated too. There's now a set of walking and running animations among other things.


Excuse that jesus glow. Just wanted to make sure it can be seen for demonstration purposes.

So there's that. Lastly. Programmer person came to me last week and proclaimed, and I quote:

PIXELSHADOWS!

He had read some books, pestered a lot of people and consulted resources to learned how to write shaders, apparently. We're back with the shadowcasting lights again. And according to the programmer person they are cheaper than they were with the old lighting system. Cannot judge on that myself though. I've got a PC made of twigs, leaves and dirt. The game was always running good for me.


There will be another feature describing how he got to that lighting later on.

Personally, I've been working on writing down the story and lore so everybody and not just me has the vision of where we're heading. I'm posting bits and pieces of that story on twitter every now and then, on cards like these.

quote panel

For now, good folks, this is the road so far in 2018. Lets see where we can make it to by the end of the year. I'm curious.

-J

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