Hi, Mladen here, the creative director at Misfit Village. Time for Devlog 3!
This time I'd like to focus on the technical aspects of Go Home Annie.
Annie is being developed in Unity with the HDRP render pipeline. We decided to go with Unity for a few key reasons:
- We like to have all our files directly in the project. For instance, we put .psd (Photoshop images) and .blend (Blender 3D models) directly into the Unity project. This allows us to edit parts of the game rapidly from right inside the engine.
- We worked with Unity for more than a decade before starting Annie so we're familiar with all the upsides and downsides.
- It allows us to access crazy modern stuff like no loading screens, awesome volumetric lighting, beautiful volumetric clouds, Nvidia's DLSS, Temporal Upscaling, complex skin shaders, crazy awesome particle effects, and so on.
Check out these clouds. I can swap them with one click in Unity. They move beautifully, the light penetrates them realistically.
Oh, yeah, if we really wanted, we could fly up into them.
The demo for Annie was created with the help of a package called Horror FPS Kit. This allowed me (while I was creating the game by myself) to focus on the gameplay and visuals while the Horror FPS Kit handled inventory, movement, and other stuff. The Kit helped us to create the demo and get the word out about our project. As the number of people working on the project and the scale and ambition grew, we quickly realized we would need a custom solution. We envisioned no loading screens, seamless transitions from cutscenes to gameplay, complex dialogue systems, easy patching and updating, etc. So our lead programmer Matthew created all these systems for the game from scratch. It took him the bigger part of a year but it was well worth it. We now have a completely custom, solid foundation upon which we're building the game.
We're leveraging Unity's Shader Graph and VFX Graph to create custom shaders and effects. I can't show you most of them for fear of spoilers, but here are a few to give you a taste:
A fishy animated through shaders!
Some red goo stuff pulsating freely, causing all kinds of mischief.
I love real-time 3d tech so I could write about this all day, but I'll end it here for now. In the next devlog, I'll be sharing how we create our cutscenes, motion capture, and animation secrets. It's pretty wild guerilla stuff. Until then, take care!
Mladen Bošnjak
Creative Director at Misfit Village