Whoo! First devlog post of the new year.
Hope you all had a fun new year’s celebration. For me, New Year’s Eve was pretty great. The weather in Chicago was pretty awful that night, but I attended a college buddy’s wedding and got to ring in the new year with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a few years. It was nice to get out and socialize for a bit after working alone on the game for so long.
Anyway, some updates on Relativity:
Lightmapping Issue Resolved
As you know, I was having a lot of problems with lightmapping in the previous update, with geometry coming out looking charred for some reason. It turns out the issue had something to do with ProBuilder, specifically the UV2 maps. ProBuilder has a button that allows you to adjust UV2 generation settings.
Somehow, by changing the value for “Angle Error” from the default 8 to 10, it solved the problem I was having with ‘charred geometry’. I am not sure why this works, or what angle error is, as it’s not discussed in the ProBuilder documents. However, it somehow fixed my problem. My guess is that the hierarchy in which game objects were organized (with the ghost layer on top of the real layer) interfered with something behind the scenes.
Anyway, here you can see the scene with the lightmapping issue resolved:
I will send an email to Gabriel at SixBySeven Studio (maker of ProBuilder) to see if he knows what’s going on here.
First Stage Redesign
I am continuing to redesign the first stage of the game. It’s more or less the first 20 – 30 minutes of the game, which is arguably the most important part, as this is where most people will get their first impression. I’m doing lots of iterations, making small improvements here and there, and it’s slowly coming together.
Here are some more work-in-progress shots:
Project Planning
I’m taking a step back from development to do some clean up and long-term project planning. The game project is starting to get pretty big and complicated enough to warrant a new approach to organizing everything.
These are priority:
- Version Control – I’m a little embarrassed to admit I don’t have a really good version control system going (aside from zipping the project folder every other day). I don’t really have an excuse except that there was a period when I kept rewriting the game from scratch and found it a little tedious to set up github each time, so just kept putting it off. Also, I had kind of a bad experience with github at a previous job, and haven’t quite gotten over it yet. But seriously, I really need to set this up now. Seems pretty universal that this is more or less mandatory.
- Asset Management – I’m learning that the system of organizing assets I used when making small prototypes in Unity is really not working well for a project that’s about 2 GB in size. Just as an example, I have about 15 different stair prefabs, and 20 different window prefabs. I can no longer remember the difference between “windowA_02” and “windowB_04”. Also, I need a way to separate the latest versions of assets from the ones used for prototyping.
Portals & Non-Euclidean Geometry
I’ve been playing around a bit with portal rendering in Unity, and I think they’d make a nice addition to Relativity. From a practical standpoint, it would actually be very helpful with regards to connecting different spaces.
However, it does seem like a pretty major game mechanic to introduce, and it would be pretty time-consuming to integrate it. It would definitely add to the tripiness and crazy physics that are already there, but I’m wondering if it might be too much?
I think I will take a few days next week to experiment and get some prototypes working. If it seems promising I’ll draw up some quick levels with this and get people to playtest it, before committing to using it all over the game.