We've been busy!

It's been a long time since the last blog post on the website. Not because we haven't been doing anything, more like we've been doing too much at once and taking time to update the website kept getting put off. Sorry!

So let me shotgun through everything we have actually been up to...

Well for starters we have cover art and a title now!

Our characters mechanics are finally finished. We added Ultra moves, parries, and tweaked every move until we were happy with it.

Each ultra move was animated along with the camera in a single take. We then set cinemachine in unity to hard follow the camera null from the animation. This basically lets us import everything in one file and saves us from having to animate the camera separately inside the engine.

Here's how they look in game:

They each took a fair bit of time, but we feel like they're an important eye-candy showcase of the game. So I'm really glad we took the time to get them right.

We also added a parry system to the game. For a short time after a player successful parries an enemy's attack, they're able to initiate a visceral attack. We're huge soulsborne fans and we felt this mechanic felt right at home here. It's very satisfying to do!

Each character has their own unique attack, so in order for this to look right, we needed the enemies to play a matching reaction animation in sync. So I had to animate 3 different reactions T.T. Was totally worth it though!

Here's how they look in game:

We did a complete particle pass on the main characters. They really needed it. So everything is looking pretty spiffy now. This took a ton of work but it really really makes the game feel much more polished.

For example, here's a short video of Red's new particle explosion:

In between particle work, we also started to design out some new characters. Just to keep from burning out on the same tasks non-stop. She's still very much a work in progress but we got to start on Panta.

She's an important NPC. So we were excited to finally get something drawn out.

Along with that we also challenged ourselves and speed modeled some of the background NPCs. This took Mike a little over a week, from concept to in-game model:

We also got a little bit of extra help! Two of our grad school friends are helping out part-time now in scripting/designer roles. It's really nice to have some things taken off our plate.

We're now in the process of getting the build ready to upgrade to our (hopefully) last big Unity engine update 2018.3. We really need some of the new features included in the update:

Speedtree 8 support as all of our vegetation and trees utilize it.

The new GPU light baker. The entire game right now is using real time lighting which is fine for now, we still get safely over 60fps. But we'd like bake most of the lighting as lighting is really our only performance intensive system for no reason.

Nested prefabs! Our main gameplay object consists of one giant prefab. So anytime someone is working in that prefab, everyone else can't touch it. Nested prefabs will save us from this!

So these are just the highlights of what we've been doing. There's also been a ton of bugfixing, and behind the scenes code that I could talk about but this post is already getting sort of long so I'll have to save it for another time :).