Hey there! Since we re received a big influx of people over the past weeks, we decided to do a quick update about something we've been doing under the shadows. So, let's get it out of the way:
🎉 We decided to adopt Unity Technologies! 🎉
This is an incredible important change for our project, in regards of features, performance, visual effects and workflow!
We are currently doing a direct port. That means, in this step we are only focusing on making a 1:1 representation of what we had under our previous engine.
After that step is done, we plan of using 100% of what Unity allows us to do. Here's a tiny list of what we have planned:
- Better terrain. This means that tiles will be gone. Being able to do terrains in any shape will make levels much more interesting and nicer to look at!
- Post processing. We wanted to achieve a special, distinctive look from quite a while. One step in cartoon like visuals, another step in reality. Now our visuals will be able to achieve quality in the likes from Rayman Origins, Ori and the Blind Forest!
- Small video tutorials. I love these games where they use a small video box that shows you what to do, in a quick, effective way. This will be in.
- Better water/blood. Since the fundation of the project, we played around liquids. They used 'metaballs' and some rendering tech that let us spawn realistic blood squirts. These rendering techniques weren't available for us but now we are able to make them again!
- Better lighting. We had a very simple light system, but we want to extend this to serve a gameplay purpose:
- Ultra-wide support + HDR!
- More than 4 gamepads for an amazing local play!
- Multiplayer online!
- Something about exploration? Due to our linear nature of our levels, we can't get much exploration in. But we are planning to improve that, so you can do quests around the map, or just exploring and finding a very special item!
As for gameplay features, everything will stay intact. However, we are planning to use multiple weapons at once, on story mode, and implement an AI feature that reacts to that. More info on this later.
Speaking of AI, we already worked on most of it:
[Smarty AI in action]
[Generic AI in action]
One of the things we are most proud about, is the "what you see is what you get" workflow. That makes things incredibly fast. Plus, we run scripts inside the editor itself, so we don't need to compile each time we do a little change. The editor itself is our game! We also took advantage of these called Gizmos, so we can quickly see what triggers what, in a quick glance:
Good thing is that most of the features are already implemented on this Unity port, but still there's a bunch to do, specially on the multiplayer side of things, but since we improved our workflow a lot (we are implementing 2 or 3 features each day!) we believe this will be done super fast.
Speaking of progress and what to do, here's a nice picture to let you see where we at:
ROADMAP
Well, that's it for now. Hope you are as excited as we are, and thanks for your continued support over the years!