Thanks for your patience during PAX, I'm back and hitting the bugs again. Here's a recent Kickstarter update for you:
It's been a while since an update! There's a reason for that - I'm finally working on Act III. At this point about 50% of my development time is going towards finishing the final parts of the game and that means we're in major spoiler territory.
I find the issue of spoilers fascinating. Through years of lurking on Game of Thrones boards I've concluded that there's no happy medium - you either stay completely unspoiled, or you just give in and say screw it, I won't even try to avoid them. This is especially true if you're hearing something weeks / months / years before you see the final work, because our brains are storytelling machines - if stories were skeletons then brains could reconstruct all 206 bones from a pinky toe and a chipped tooth. Often all you need is the premise and the general tone of a story to guess the end game.
There's also no point in the here's a tiny bit of info that won't spoil anything approach, because even though we're great at reconstructing stories, we stink at consciously spotting the connections between bits of information in a story we already know. Someone might relay a throwaway joke from season 2 of a show you're watching - oh don't worry, they assure you, it's a scene that contributes nothing to the overall plot so it won't spoil anything - but of course they don't realize they've just spoiled the fact that the character telling the joke doesn't die in season 1. If that was supposed to be a source of tension in season 1... oops.
So these days if I don't want to know about a movie or a game, I don't read / watch / listen to anything related to it. And if you want to stay unspoiled for FRONTIERS, I recommend you don't read the rest of this update, because you'll have little trouble figuring out what's coming.
Spoilers Begin Now!
Before our Serious Business concluded, the GRT wasn't a 'T' - the story just called for a gigantic ruined thing, not a tower. (okay, technically still a 'GRT' but whatever.)
But once the idea of a tower was introduced - one that could be seen from anywhere in the game world - the ending of the game changed subtly. Reaching the tower became a primary goal. Not just reaching the Uncharted, not just finding Daniel, but exploring the tower itself. Ryan integrated this into the Act III dialog and game endings. I integrated it into the design & size of the tower. The result is a structure that utterly dominates the landscape around it.
The GRT in its native habitat
Creating the tower has been technically challenging. The structure system in FRONTIERS isn't designed to support interiors this large, so I've had to use a number of one-off cheats. First - it's not just one structure but dozens. Each floor is spawned and saved separately. Second - those floors are connected in a way that allows me to un-load lower / higher floors as you move through it, keeping those evil memory errors at bay. Third - for the large outer pieces of the tower I'm using a unity prefab instead of the FRONTIERS structure system so I can optimize it further.
One floor of the tower. It's hot in there.
Yes there will be climbing
Some fun custom shaders have been created for the exterior. On top of a simple illuminated glowing inner core that pulsates with energy is a distortion shader with custom fog settings. The global fog used through the rest of the game made the top of the tower look a bit odd - it was never meant to be used on objects this tall - so this shader applies a gradient from dark to light that matches the color of the ground fog. Overlaid on that is a detail shader that breaks up the surface a bit and adds some detail up close. (The poly count on the tower itself is very low.) Finally there's a detail shader for use on opaque elements meant for climbing. I may not be able to give the tower surface AAA treatment, but I can at least give it enough detail for the eye to determine scale while climbing it.
Inner glow
Outer distortion / fog shader
Final detail overlay
Opaque pipe material
The tower also has some unusual technology that you won't find in Kantvarld - at least not very often. Remember the bizarre device in Albert's loft? You'll finally get to see some of those in action. I've also had fun programming all the varied uses of the Obex Spheres, which were introduced in an inert form in the prologue. These things get a workout in Act III.
A copy of Albert's machine
New forms of Luminite - what are they for? WHO CAN SAY?
Actually navigating the tower is going to be difficult. No structure this size comes without some kind of security system. And when you find out who's in charge of that security system - well, you can probably guess at this point, but I think that's enough spoilers for one update.
Okay maybe just one more:
Holy crap I'm rich!
We're long overdue for another video update so expect a video where I talk about making an active volcano! (oops spoilers!)
Cheers,
- L