A vague progress report
by | posted in: Unity | 2

The fluid puzzler is coming along really well!  Since it’s a short-form puzzle game, I don’t want to show too much of its actual content for fear of ruining some of the fun.  The current plan is to have 21 levels, and as of today I have 11 that have at least a first draft.  Each puzzle needs to go through a few rounds of playtesting with fresh eyes, or else they’ll end up being shitty and frustrating.

We’ve found our visual artist and two voice actors, but I don’t have content from them yet, so I’ll save their intros for another time.

Here’s a quick screenshot that shows a text renderer that I implemented yesterday and today.  Not the most exciting tool…but a vital one for this game.  I couldn’t use Unity’s default text-mesh-generator, because it didn’t support some important features like smooth word-by-word reveals and wordwrap (which would have been a pain in the ass to work around).

Mild spoiler - the chemist mentioned is Louis Fieser, a real-life historical figure...

Still lots to do, but progress is looking good!

I’ve got bad news…and two kinds of good news
by | posted in: Not the Robots, Titanium Frontier, Unity | 2

The bad news is that Titanium Frontier has been cancelled for some very frustrating financial reasons (and I don’t mean that we ran out of money – don’t worry, we’re fine).  If this is disappointing to you, too, contact me and I can explain the circumstances in further detail.

The first good news is that Not the Robots is about to get its biggest update so far – more information can be found on the Steam forums.  It adds a Save+Quit option for Campaign mode, improves performance (particularly for lower-end hardware), makes it easier to access You Find Yourself In A Room 2 (which can be unlocked with a cheat code now, instead of only by completing all 20 Challenge levels…which is extremely difficult), and various other tweaks and fixes, too.  I think it represents a noticeable increase in the overall quality of the game, and I hope that you guys will agree!

The other good news is that cancelling a project means we get to work on a new thing instead!  This one’s got a smaller scope – and this is probably going to be the general plan for a little while.  Smaller games, faster development times, cheaper prices, and we’ll expand further on the ideas that are received well by the audience.

First up:  A puzzle game centered around a fluid simulation!  The tech is in a similar vein as Spewer, an old game that I worked on…but this time there’s no platforming going on, so the gameplay’s focus is more on the fluid mechanics.  Can’t talk about the puzzle structure yet, but for now, I’ve got a fun little tech demo video.  More info soon!

A city
by | posted in: Unity, UntitledBulletHell.com | 0

Part of the single player campaign in UntitledBulletHell.com (…new title soon) calls for 3D flyover views of 19 different cities.  This is a gargantuan art task for a team of our size (…two), so I’ve been making a procedural-generation-powered tool to help with creating cityscapes out of a manageable number of art assets.  These cities will only be presented as screensaver-style flyovers (since all of the core gameplay occurs out in the field), which gives the generator a ton of wiggle room to be naive and stupid about its placement rules…as long as the results are pretty from above.  Here’s what a current result looks like (with all placeholder art assets):

(Click for full size)
(Click for full size)

I’ve also been doing a lot of groundwork for the game’s storyline lately, since it’s nearly time to start plugging away at single player/co-op content in full force.  I figured out some key narrative points about the overall setting yesterday, which will help me for…probably the entire duration of the writing process.  Hooray!

Enjoy your Sunday.

Sand update
by | posted in: Unity, UntitledBulletHell.com | 4

I spent some more time working on the sand shader for the desert zone – here’s a little animation of how it’s looking:

Nothing else to show for the moment – happy Friday

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One Response

  1. Mike
    | Reply

    Nice idea with the musical instruments, that’s suuuuuuper important for learning something completely. Like you’re going to know about different materials and how sound works, thats cool. I learned about how meat dries, and now I have an idea of how things dry. Also, for the cell game, (maybe) making it more realistic, by like making it kinda like a 3d osmosis jones will make it more visceral and real. maybe. Yea but it’s gonna take you a while to make anything, just like my cousin who’s an artist, each mosaic takes like a month, depending how big it is. A big project, like on the side of a building took him like 8 months, but his work is…. rigorous and detailed and very thoughtful and carefully crafted. His works are good, old museum art good, like roman vases good. Anyway, yea it’s good that you are making your own instruments because i’m doing the same thing, but with economics. It really helps you understand precisely how the physical world works. It’s nice.

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