https://youtu.be/YLykOqBlIGI
The new forests of Amethyst Mountain are coming together quite nicely now, as you saw in last week’s “Peaceable Kingdom” video. This week we look at the technical side of vegetation: How we set up the trees and other vegetation objects in the game scene so they “grow” where they should, and not where they shouldn’t. We’re using an amazing plugin for Unity called Vegetation Studio Pro, which lets you set spawning rules (e.g. tree #1 should spawn in low elevations, tree #2 in high elevations, etc.), and then uses cutting-edge rendering techniques that allow us to have hundreds of thousands of trees in the scene without killing game performance. Like many game development tools, it’s quick and easy (and fun) to create a rough version of what you want….and then lots and lots of tweaking and testing to get it just how you want it. (For example: did anyone spot the tree without a trunk in the video?)
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We know everyone wants to know when when when! We are still hoping to release the first episode, Amethyst Mountain, by the end of 2018 for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access — but we aren’t quite as far along as I had hoped to be by now, so that’s a goal, not a guarantee. At any rate, that’ll be followed by Slough Creek some months later in 2019, then followed by the mobile versions. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall.