Well hello there, ladies and mentlegen.

John here.

I’m about to give a run-down on where we are right now and where to go so grab your popcorn or whatever else and READ! Because if I find out you didn’t … I digress.

Where we are

The last couple of weeks have been a rodeo with the game engine the programmer person settled on. So lets start with that.

Originally we intended, for the sake of whatever the hell, to run the game on a low internal resolution. What that means? It means we were going to draw things on an A6 paper and then stretch the whole damn thing to fit on anything larger than that. So to speak.

It caused a lot of trouble with the UI and also some visual artifacts.
Look at this.

Sorry about the eye cancer.
But what you can see here is a Unity classic.
Stretching pixels. With this wonderful checker pattern you see just a mild disturbance but imagine such a stretching effect on your face. Or mine.
That’s no good.

So in effect, programmer person threw the whole thing out of the window and re wired the whole light mapping process. You know. The thing where it makes light sources bright and all light-y.

Now using a post processing effect for the lightmaps it turned out that Unity is still regressing on a weird bug where it doesn’t account for different handling of coordinate systems for Direct 3D (DX11 for you guys out there) and OpenGL based renderers.
So in D3D the whole thing was suddenly upside down.
Well what the hell, Unity.

(It does that at least since version 5.3 and we’re on 5.5 now, for the records)

It was fixed by using OpenGL as default rendering pipeline. Who needs DX11 when there’s OpenGL 4.5 anyway.
Well I don’t know but that’s what the programmer person said.

So we’re good now.
We’re using a variety of different techniques to make unity render pixel-perfect but we do so in your native screen resolution and still get all the pixels right. There’s that. We will stay with this solution or heads will roll, I can tell you that much. And it won’t be my head either.

We also have soundscapes now. That is awesome because I can now dictate …. I mean define … what sounds should go where.
What that means is that I can make birds chirp wherever the hell I please. Or make the wind blow. Feels godly.
On a serious note: This tool allows me to compose a set of sounds and let them play together to create ambience effects. It also has slight randomisation so you won’t hear the same wind sound every five seconds. You see, I think about you.

Lastly on the matter of where we are, the graphics guy produced some more assets and did an art pass on some existing ones.

I’m not convinced the grass is okay though but he’ll manage. I’ll just crack this whip a little more often and I can get decent grass out of him eventually.

Also: TIKKI TORCHES!
I’m going to be perfectly honest with you here. When I was at Vrennman Mansion, there were no tikki torches. Not a single one. Why would they have them anyway?
But it’s my personal belief that every good game needs tikki torches so we have them.

Where to go from here

The next step is already prepared.
The rough flow of the first level (a very short one) was made and we will continue making the second one. For that we already made a lot of new assets and code.

What I still want are some more sequencer operators.
That’s the building blocks of every game sequence and they allow me to rig up all sorts of things. I need one that displays a choice to the player because when I was there, at Vrennman Mansion, I had a lot of decisions to make and the least of them were the right ones.
You’ll have to go through the same in order to experience the whole case properly!

Estimations (and my money) say it should be another 2-3 months for the second mansion level to be done. It will contain a lot of puzzles.
After that it’s time to think about how to work with Ellen.

But that’s for another entry.

Have a good one!
-J