God Machine update 5-20-19

So I just updated the intro cutscene to the game and uploaded it to youtube with a tiny bit of gameplay test footage- you can see it here-



As I've finally started the actual real game's level design I've had to add some art- lighting, materials etc-

As I've done so the style has gone the direction of my old style I used in We Are The Strange which is STR8NIME

Now I didn't purposely use the style- its just where the game guided me and before I knew it I was back in the style I used to love ^_^

Though I'm refining the style and now I love it even more- Its been 12 years of experience making things since I did We Are The Strange to learn all sorts of new stuff-

So right now I'm putting the finishing touches on the first level's art- well the art is done now I'm just doing the cutscene's that happen inside the level- I've found that I'm definitely leveraging my filmmaking skills with these cutscene's to really add an emotional connection for the player to the game-

I'm using WonderUnit's Storyboarder to do my cutscene storyboards-

I'm just sketching using the mouse as my boards are really rough- then I export a Premiere xml file and fine tune the edit to the musical score I've created for each cutscene-

When the fine edit is done I go to work making the cutscene in Slate-


Screenshot of what the guts of a cutscene made inside Unity using Slate looks like-

Creating elaborate cutscene using Slate can be a little tricky- there's some annoyances like every time you add a new animation or audio track you have to press stop then play again to see the changes- I really like working fast so there's a few frustrating things about it BUT its just a tool and tools are never perfect- I'm just going to be thankful that I can create such cool cutscenes inside of Unity-

All the player mechanics are locked in- that is until play testing shows me whats broken ^_^

I think I did mention in a previous post that I started doing pixel art for the game icons and the like-

Icon for the "Doll Head" item you get and have to wear in the game to access certain areas... look familiar? ^_^

I also discovered some cool royalty free pixel art UI sets by an artist named "Buch" that I've integrated with my art for the game's ui and menu's like in the above image and also here-

I've been doing a lot of simple pixel art but advanced shading and the like is beyond my skill set right now so I was happy to find this cool stuff to use for my menu's etc-

It seems I've created over 4 hours of original music for the game's soundtrack so far...

Now- most all of that music was made before I started designing the functioning levels- as I have been designing the real levels I've found I need more low-key music so I'll probably end up making another hour or two of music to fit the levels-

The 4 hours of music came out of my imagination so it wasn't tied directly to existing designs of course- so there is a need to make new very specific music-

Right now I'm working towards finishing the game's first 4 level's which are like the pre-game that prep you for the big journey- I plan to release the pre-game as a sample of things to come- and to generate interest in the full game etc-

This first level design is going a lot faster than I anticipated as its just about dropping in/arranging/connecting things that already exist- so as of right now I hope to have the playable pre-game out in 3-4 months-

Doing this pre-game answers a lot of questions about the game's workflow- you can plan all you want but you don't know what you really need until you really start making the thing-

When working on a big game in Unity things like Hierarchy organization become important- this is the direction I'm going in now-

When you have these big scene's with hundreds of objects hierarchy organization is really important- I'm not sure this will be the final method though-

Also asset organization becomes important as well as you need to pull out different objects all the time to add to your scene-

This is my Prefabs/ScenePrefabs folder- as of right now this structure with  BARRIERS - CONTROLLERS - DECORATION - HAZARDS - KEYS - LOCKS - SMARTOBJECTS - TRANSPORT is working well though I'll probably fine tune it a bit-

One of the advantages of using STR8NIME is that a blocky/pixel look fits the style and is very performant- for example a look at the first level -

The whole level is built with cubes and planes-now this can be very repetitive and boring aesthetically if you don't know what you are doing- I'm doing my best to keep it interesting- 

One of the main reasons for using a cube based design is performance- well performance and simplicity- A big game like this cannot rely on Mesh Colliders so I would end up having to build my own compound colliders using Box colliders, Sphere's, Capsules-

I've done this before and I hate it! So my solution is to lean on the Str8nime style and be creative with my box based designs- when it comes to adding colliders to my geometry I just add a box collider and I'm done ^_^

Also the player can cling onto any surface(moving and static) AND place bombs and other things onto these surfaces(moving and static)- I built the systems so that they cannot be used with Mesh Colliders so all signs point to boxy level geo- since I'm going with a str8nime style I'm happy with it-

The game uses fast, dynamic, flexible gameplay and I don't want to trade that for fancy level geometry- I'm making the game I want to play and I don't care about fancy/high poly art- I want the gameplay to be great and have cool looking STYLISH level geo-

So the levels are simple low poly art arranged in interesting ways and since I'm quite adept in the art of lighting I think its going to be ok ^_^

PLUS I'm going to be using Pizza Borders!

I'm going to use this Pizza Border technique a lot from this excellent video by Carlos Coronado - I would really recommend checking out this vid as this Carlos dude is really resourceful and has some great techniques-

Another thing I've really been grinding on is trying to find the optimal level design workflow for my work- this is my current workflow 

So yeah- lot's getting done- lot's more to do!

Until next time-