April 2022 Update! Lots of Progress!

This has been a long, crazy month, but it is all good stuff.

James and Curtis have dug in and begun working on their respective sides of the project, while Kent continues his. Allegra has wrapped up her special terrain kit for our newest and arguably most important piece. And I have been busy with a lot of misc tasks related to running the business, keeping everyone on the same page, and organizing our milestones. 

Lighting System

Morningstar is taking advantage of Smart Lighting 2D to add light to our 2D Isometric world. 

Isometric 2D is an extreamly difficult and unforgiving format to work with, and lighting it encounters all of the specific challenges involved in this style. Having a Day/Night system isn't too hard, but lighting it dynamically, and casting shadows on the terrain, is tough. This has required a lot of finagling on our sprite vs quad mesh system, and really digging into Unity's methods for handling how we sort and bake our sprites. 

We've been experimenting with adding normals to our sprites so they can dynamically react to directional lighting, but this is one of those features we are likely to scrap as the game matures. For one it doubles our texture memory budget on the GPU, and doubles the workload on us artists. For the purely visual value it adds it's definitely impressive and immersive, and there's an argument to be made here that maybe a tiny 128x128 normal on our 512x512 textures isn't that big of a deal. They can even be slightly blurry and rushed with an almost automatic normal generation tool like Ndo. 

But in the end, since stealth isn't a huge element of our gameplay (you can use cover of darkness and line of sight to hide your approach to a target to give you more time to attack, but it's not a main focus) we don't really need to worry about that level of fidelity. 

Art Updates

Allegra has finished our newest texture set for our unique biological walls is in. Spoilers for what it is, but it's cool to look at. And it's the first thing you see at the start of the game, many times throughout, and at the end. So it's very important to have this done. 

We've also begun adding more range to our faces, and rubbing some salt into their skin to age them with more detail and contrast. They've needed a good aging pass for a while so they don't look so clean and young. More detail is helping quite a bit. 

We've also started looking at ways to manage sprite layers better with a dynamic atlasing system which has already proven to be many times more performant than our old sprite baker. Utilizing Unity's Burst, we can rapidly change outfits on several characters at once, in all 8 of their directions, without missing a beat. The old system would take a great deal of time to bake each sprite's 8 directions. The new one blasts through it in milliseconds. 

Tile Map Accelerator

Curtis has begun work on our Shader Based Tile Mapping system, which is our Phase 3 approach to the procedural generation of our maps. 

This phase 3 approach will have advanced automatic batching and dynamic sprite atlasing, allowing us to maintain very high resolution terrain and objects, lower save file sizes, and rapidly drive our terrain generation with threaded processes that are blazing fast. 

Driven by complex rules based on the Biome.xml and Terrain System, we'll utilize a wave form collapse algorythm to generate terrain based on some ideal templates. This will result is fast generating terrain that is "smart," and will not look like a machine just spit it out at random, allowing game-play balance to be baked right into the design and avoid unwanted navigational hazards our existing purely random approach causes. No more single patches of dry cracked clay, and no more single squares of deep water! 

Combined with out system for draggable buildings and cliffs, we can have cool cave systems and underground hideouts. Eventually as our blueprint system from SOS2 makes it over to Morningstar, we'll also have artist created blueprints for buildings, which procedurally populate the footprint of town templates, each faction can have unique looking locations that are human made. They will look good and play with a level of game-play balance the machine can't imagine, while still having random contents and layouts that are never quite the same.

No minecraft villages that are broken up and noisy here. Even while procedural, there is a reason behind why that well is the center of town, and why the workshops are laid out apart from the houses. All defended by smart guard posts and walls. 

Morningstar Animation Framework

If you recall from our hiring campaign back in March, the job post outlined a very robust animation utility that will replace our terrible Phase 1 prototype. 

James was scouted by me, and also hired, because he had made a mod for RimWorld that did exactly what our game needed to do. Use keyframe animations in a dynamic way that our artists can rapidly iterate upon in full production, and export them in a format available for future modders to build on. 

And this system now exists!

As you can see in the above images there are a lot of great tools we can use as artists to produce very cool weapon and shield animations. Each major part of the body is modular and sorts dynamically, and still fits the isometric perspective, switchable by a toggle. This will let us pull off cool death animations, chains of weapon attacks, add new weapons, and not break a sweat doing so.

This tool is a huge boon to our production. Since all the combat and workstation animations will be driven by it, it's a major overhaul of all the sprite sorting system we talked about up above, but it enables, long term, for our game to grow and look really impressive, despite the characters being "pawns" with no arms and legs.

The UI Overhaul

As you may have seen at the top image, the prototype build UI is currently scaling all over the place. 

That's because we are moving from the Unity Canvas System over to UI Toolkit. 

UI Toolkit is almost a secret at Unity. They just don't advertise it. 

I am not kidding when I say this, I found it almost at random while looking for a solution to our XML driven UI, in a YouTube video, from Unity Unite 2019. (Back before Covid when we had events like that in Meat Space.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4tfgI1XvGs 

So while it is a huge undertaking and has taken Kent all month, we've been porting all the UI elements I made in Canvas System over to UI Toolkit. 

The Batching there is far far better, and reduces draw calls from the hundreds down to the tens, and even lower for most UI elements. It also enables dynamic scaling in the Options menu. So if you, like I do, prefer your menus small and compact, you can leave it at default. Or if you're like Kent and like your UI huge, you have all that in-between to be comfortable with. 

The suffering we experience battling with this hydra is going to pay off in the end! 

The Wrap Up

Now empowered with 3 Coders and 2 Artists all working full time, we are off to the races. April was an extremely productive month where we began casting off the old and dusty Pre Production prototypes, and began heading towards our Full Production milestone. 

Getting all this in Plastic SCM which we use for version control, and our Trello, has been my main occupation. 

As you can tell, these tickets are expansive and cover every fragment of our game. It's very cool having everything in one place, well organized, and ready for the future.