On 4th of July, I attended Invisible Arcade 6. Invisible Arcade is an event that was started in Seattle by Samantha Kalman as a punk rock video game show.
This was the first time Invisible Arcade took place outside of Seattle, so it was really awesome to have RELATIVITY in the line up.
The show consisted of performers on stage playing through three games and discussing them. Each game had a different set of performers.
RELATIVITY was on first, and was performed by Kate Welch, with Jenn and Trin on stage offering commentary throughout (mostly about Kate’s hair and Hogwarts).
It turned out really well, and Kate actually completed the demo while on stage! She had only played the first few tutorial puzzles before the show to get a feel of the game, so a lot of these puzzles she approached blind. There are some difficult puzzles in the demo, and playing a puzzle game in front of a whole crowd of people is pretty intense, so major props to Kate!
Programming Lessons
On Monday, I did a code review with Chris, who has been helping me with refactoring gameplay systems in RELATIVITY.
Mostly it’s about making better abstractions, having things be extensions of classes instead of all bunched together in one script, using delegates instead of multiple checks between scripts, etc.
I talked about it in Part 1 of yesterday’s stream: https://youtu.be/_XZMjvK2J_Y
I’ve also realized I still need to be pretty closely tied in with the programming. I thought I could just pass it off to Chris and focus on design alone, but I think the design of the mechanics in RELATIVITY is so closely tied together with the programming that it’s not really possible to separate the two.
Transparent Shadow
When using the Unity standard shader in “Transparent” rendering mode, I get this really nice crosshatch pattern in the shadow (right), but in my custom shader, even though I can get the material itself to have alpha, I still have a solid shadow (left):
In the end, I actually did decided to keep this as a feature, since it helps with the box, but I had to come up with a workaround for the double gravity leaf material (since that uses a custom shader).
Basically, there’s a duplicate leaf mesh that’s using the standard shader, but I have it set on “shadow only” for the shadow option. And then the leaf material with the actual double gravity leaf material just doesn’t cast a shadow at all.
New Level – Pillar and Grid
