I know I promised a riveting tale into the legal ramifications of our name choice, but as we were putting together a post for Screenshot Saturday, it sort of turned into something that works for a blog post! So stop complaining, we'll get to semantics some other day.
Instead, you'll get to see an almost day-to-day tour along the current visual progress of the project, formally known as Frostbite but now known as *
Cryophobia*. Fair warning: there's a lot of delicious animated gifs here, so the bandwidth-limited should beware!
John did the art for Frank himself, Zach did the weapons shown, and Christian did the wonderful scenery and animations (
you do remember who these people are, don't you?).
These are less legit marketing-level screens than they are almost a dev journal of sorts, showing the progress of the game over the last two and a half weeks or so, but, well, screw it. "If you're not embarrassed when you release, you waited too long." So, without further ado, see how much (or how little) has been done over the past month!
Here it is, the proto-image that was recorded while looking for a lighting solution that we liked, featuring
Sprites and Bones for the limited animations used. This used a workflow very similar to
Sprite Lamp, that is, taking four lighting maps and compiling them into a normal map, in conjunction with a cel-shading-lite shader to handle the banded rendering. It looks pretty good, I think, but we were getting ahead of ourselves! No one plays a game on lighting alone, so we got to work on gameplay!
Yeah! Jumpin'! This is a first recording of the basic physics. Quite slippery, but the game allows running by holding shift and sticking to walls with right-mouse-button (which will eventually be explained as using an ice pick to wall-hang). It's a good start, but obviously still needs work.
Ah, the transition from flat-surface-only to sloped physics. Movement is relatively smooth between level changes. A 40-degree threshold is enforced, which is shown (kinda) when the player moves to the right-most and left-most slopes, which are 45 degrees. At that point the player is forcibly slid down to the bottom of the slope. The last few seconds show a mighty physics leap that was never reproduced outside this recording, but that's a programmer's life! It never breaks till you show it to other people.
The first Spriter animation is created! We were going to use Sprites and Bones, but were convinced to take a closer look at Spriter after seeing the before/after of another gamedev's workflow on Twitter. Turns out to have been the biggest timesaver yet on the project, so that's a definite win! This shows the obviously inadequate portions of the original sprite, in particular the back of the thighs and the calves at the knee.
The animation from Spriter is imported (sans scarf, I think we tried to use the skinning feature and it just totally blew up on us) and was successfully played within Unity, obviously at the wrong scale. The inventory system is hinted at with the floating pick.
Tremble, mortals, and despair. The first attempt to apply walking animation as a child of the player object is disastrous. Turns out the Spriter devs weren't kidding when they said the Unity importer did not work at any scale besides 100 pixels/unit. I'm just surprised that it managed to come out with any sort of cohesion, straight into our nightmares.
Animations are working! A simple walk, run, idle, jump, fall, and landing animation are implemented with their blend transitions hacked in (so not controlled by the proper context of the movement code). It was technically shown in the last one, but you can see at the beginning here where the player hangs onto the side of the first ledge and presses up to climb. We have yet to get a good hang/climb animation set going, so for now he teleports into place.
Second pass of the animation system. Transitions have been successfully moved to the movement code and so trigger at better times. Some things are still a bit finicky, but it's mostly due to lack of certain transition animations, such as a running-land. That stick behind him is the sledgehammer, one of the other weapons Frank will eventually have in his arsenal.
Mouse look was implemented (way, way later than it should have been), and so the possibility of looking in a different direction from where one is moving is suddenly possible. Backwards-running and backwards-walking animations were therefore drawn up in Spriter. So easy a programmer could do it.
The flamethrower has been drawn and in the test scene for a while, but this is the first time it's been documented in a gif! The flame effect was thrown together in Spriter using the default fireball sprites included with Spriter Pro, which is pretty obvious but makes for a great temp animation. Frank turns to face the mouse cursor and his head follows the up and down movement (within reason). Metric tons of physics-related bugs have now been created due to the mouse follow, but hopefully most of them will prove to be a simple fix.
And there you have it! A little under a month's worth of progress for a game that's been years in the making! I'll probably make a few more posts in this style as we rack up progress pictures, so follow us on twitter (@teltura) to get updates as they happen!
--Christian McCarty, "teltura".
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