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First Demo Video


At Last the mini world fully recreated in unity. This video is only a test of core movement of the player cube, testing collisions around the mini-world, and in general trying to get a nice shader look with the right lighting.. etc
All early experiments. There are no functionality mechanics demonstrated in this video such as the color key pickup, item pick up, npc dialog, elevator movement, other moving objects, re-spawning, sliding on ice..etc

The video is a few mins of me walking the cube around the world, and toward the end of the video I show an example of a dark / night time setting demonstrating the lighting/neon effects possible with the game.

Because I cant figure a good solution for proper real time emissive materials I have had to put point lights in a lot of places such as all the color key/switch's, item cubes, elevators and some other other areas. Other areas where there is a lot of glowing elements I have not used any lights. Some lights are set to prioritize over others since unity tends to flicker lights if there are many on screen at once. I have prioritized importance on lights adjacent to structure. Most lights are low quality and not set to cast shadow.

Water is 8 layers of transparency to emulate water material shader. 8 layers like this is not ideal so it will need a proper water shader of some sort.

Elevators shown in the video are not in any perticular starting position, and are mainly placed the way they are so I had access to otherwise locked areas of the world for testing reasons. There are a couple of elevators I put into the world that should not be there, the reason was to give me access to areas to test.

Video demonstration is using perspective camera with close to isometric on its focus point, however the game might be in pure orthogonal, in perticular on section 3 (the special optical illusion area)

A few other minor mistakes here and there, and also minor details or improvements to come, but in general this is likely how the game will look.

Camera shader/filtering used are

DOF / Tilt Shift
SSAO
Screen Overlay
Color Correction x2
FXAA3 Anti-aliasing
Bloom
Chromatic Aberration

The game should be able to toggle these features on/off with user settings, rather then me using special shaders on assets that would be harder to toggle in a game setting context.

i7 / gtx660 - No Frame Drop Experienced While Testing so far, Perhaps a one or two frames while fraps was recording. GPU Load/Heat Well out of range of mobile devices, but well within my specs and reasonably older system specs

Note: Music is not mine, I just picked some random track so there was not complete silence for 7 mins of video

IMPORTANT.. Video is very compressed quality, the actual game looks much crisper.
The video was recorded at only 1360x768 so its not full HD.
There is "rippling" appearing as the graphics scroll, and most prominent when the camera is settling to a stop, I think this is related to v-sync and will be fixed. The Issue could also be AA related in that most edges in screen are 45degrees so with the perspective offset on the camera the edges offset from 45 very slightly will be hard to smoothen even with good AA

Also PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

https://youtu.be/e507WS9YNiE

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Simulated Color Pick-Up Action (Day/Night)

This video shows me demonstrating the color pickup mechanic, As mentioned before there is no functionality to this yet, its just a simulation.

These next videos are all using the new player cube object. Before I was using a simple cube with texture map on each side, this new player object is in fact made up of 40 separate elements, 6 inner faces, 8 corners, 12 edge segments, 6 socket/slots a core piece, 6 point lights, and a container mesh. Seems elaborate for such a simple looking cube but there is good reason for all those elements.

This video only shows me showing the color key on the cube and walking around with it. In the real game the "key switches" will only light up when the player has collected its corresponding "key square", likewise when the player collects a "key square" that square should go dark, and when the player activates a "key switch" both the switch and color side of the cube will return to normal, none of these attributes are shown in this video.

Note: the 2nd half of the video shows dark/night time.. however I forgot to turn off vignette filtering which should have been done due to it causing noticeable artifacts around the edge which are amplified in this videos compression.

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxZxdCaJllM

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Simulated Item-Cube Pick-Up Action

This is another short video, this time demonstrating picking up an item-cube.. here I try to simulate it a bit better by changing things in the scene and the cube after I rolled onto it, then continuing to record, you can see a slight jump on the camera where I had to stop and make changes.. anyway just an example of what picking up an item would look like.

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni3F8RNzDdE

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Simulated Moving Elements

Simulating the look of moving elements. These are not good representations of how moving elements will work because on each occasion in the video the player would have needed to switch something to make the moving element move. Just to demonstrate I set up automatic loop animations of the cable car and swing bridge going from one position to another position. You might also notice that i have to roll with the cable car to keep on it, this wont happen in the game and the cube will be rooted on moving objects. HOWEVER.. after crossing water a few times I see that this might be a good mechanic in other situations in the game proper.

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkxPbFqh-A8

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Orthogonal Perspective / Isometric Angle

All the videos above have so far been using a perspective camera which is set at an isometric angle on its focus point. This ideally is a nice effect for most of the world, but there will be occasions where the camera will need to switch to a very specific isometric angle using flat orthogonal perspective, such as the special optical illusion areas as covered in the design document. I am still undecided whether to have the whole game in orthogonal.

In this video I forgot to turn off DOF/ Tilt Shift which should have been done, however even with DOF still on the optical illusion nature of things are not given away too much.

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEeGBBjeVbU

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Day and Night Cycle Test

The prototype may not have a Day/Night Cycle, however I thought to try out some early experiments anyway since the game proper most likely will have this feature. This day/night cycle is a very very simple basic one. Its not ideal and would require a lot more work to get it to look right. Right now its just a rotating directional light that is set to dim its shadows at dusk/dawn, also the color changes on dusk dawn, but its very crude right now. The day/night cycle time is just 2 mins to demonstrate but would be longer in game.
I also have the camera to reduce its vignette filter while it getting dark and off while its full night time, then back on when the day comes around again.

The particle you might notice in the water are trying to emulate bubbles, and is only a placeholder for now , forget to turn it off for the video.

I hit some weird frame rate/slow down issue toward the end of this video, I am not sure if its because of fraps, or the game.. I will look into that.

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhvChQA0Abw

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Many Improvements

 


Much Improved Water
- Rising Bubbles (Cubic Style)
- Breaking Water Animation where Water Meets Land/Objects (Cubic Style)
- Breaking Bubbles on surface in random areas (Cubic Style)

Improved Night / Day Cycle
- Vignetted
- Shadow Intensity / Bias
- Color Correction
- Amplified Bloom

- CAMAER 2 (Ambient camera)
- Color Correction
- Shadow Intensity

NPC Animation Tests
- Importing from Blender
- Testing / Learning how to apply animations in unity

Improved Lighting Effects
- A lot of improvements to the neon/glowing elements in the world
- Swing Bridge and Cable Car have a night light
- Certain lights will attract cubic type insects
- Other areas will attract glowing cubic insects such as reeds near cable car.
- The glow on item cubes now slowly pulses

Fixed many Collision Issues
Added New collisions in areas where the player is between two blocks so cant climb out

Better Day/Night Cycle, and Improvements to Night Time, Water, and Other Improvements.

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

https://youtu.be/oRoDTsgVpI8

Night Time Effects such as Lamps / Minimal Cubic Moths, Fire Flies..etc

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

https://youtu.be/08aRBipD20U

Day / Night Cycle Time Lapse

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

https://youtu.be/x2AdSPAMT7E

A Few various NPC animation tests

PLEASE select fullscreen 720p in Youtube or you wont see the full 60 frames per second anything under and youtube will play at 25fps

https://youtu.be/vcyUH6trhmA





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