Month: July 2018

Gunhead July Dev Log – PAX10, Mission Generation and objectives, VR Test

Vermeulen

Hello again!
For the past month we’ve been focused on getting Gunhead ready to show at PAX West, since it got accepted into the PAX10:
http://west.paxsite.com/indie
We were really surprised to get into this! We’ve always submitted our games to PAX10 and never got a game in so early in development (the build we sent them was a pretty old demo of the game). So we are happy to get some external validation that the game is actually very fun.

Some of the things we are working on include:

Refining how procedural generation algorithms work for adding enemies/systems to ships:

Ship Salaged UI for after a ship is beaten:

End stats shown after failing (similar stats shown after beating the campaign):

And we are working on bringing Cryptark’s Mission Objectives system to Gunhead. These are bonus objectives you can go for to get additional bonus money.

And finally completely unrelated to PAX, we spent a few hours trying out a VR version of Gunhead:
It is definitely fun – and I think we know a good way to handle locomotion for this (not just teleporting). After testing this we decided that if we did make a VR version it would need to be its own tailored experience – a large amount of the game would need to be adjusted, and doing it now would negatively affect the desktop/non-VR version we want to focus on. So if we do make a VR version it will only be after the game is released.

If you haven’t yet you can wishlist Gunhead on Steam to keep up to date on development! It’ll also help us gauge interest in the game from players – and help with our release:

thanks!
– Lee

Wytchwood July Update: Tools and Design

Vermeulen

Hello there! In this update we’ll show some of the behind the scenes tools we’ve made for designing Wytchwood.

Here’s a typical scene in Wytchwood with how it looks when working in Unity.

We’ve set it up so that our game camera can follow our editor camera around. This helps immensely with setting the visual style of Wytchwood. This way, we use a typical workflow within our engine while getting a very good idea of how placing objects is going to look in the end.

The ground in Wytchwood always looks really detailed. We achieve this by using a tool to “paint”many objects on the ground. The problem is when there are so many objects close together videogame cameras can have a hard time determining which object is “closer.” The result of that is one object could be rendered in front of another object when it should be rendered behind.

This is handled with a special camera that renders the ground first,

then the regular camera renders the rest of the scene on top of it.

The blue blob on the ground is the AI NavMesh. We use this to determine if part of the world is accessible by the player and NPCs. In a typical 3D game, a NavMesh might be generated based on placement of floors, ladders, stairs and obstacles. In Wytchwood, it made sense to be able to author it by hand.

This takes a bit of upfront effort but is easy to maintain and really fast to iterate on. It also allows us to specifically define where we want the player to be able to go. Consider the following:

This is an eagle eye view of a scene in Wytchwood. You might see that the navmesh doesn’t stretch down all the way to the base of those rock pillars. That’s because they might get in the way of the player being able to see where they’re going.

The NavMesh also comes into play when we want to make sure that The Witch is always able to find goodies.

And this breezy foliage here I feel is pretty sharp.

We put a lot of effort in taking our beautiful art assets and turning it into a lush world full of breath and life. Thanks for tuning in!

Liam