All good things must come to an end: Victory in our game

Good day, fine Sirs and Ladies!

Welcome to our fine Blog once again. This is one of Mythwing’s Developers, Searonik, And I would like to explain a little bit about what we’ve been brewing on the back burner as we get out game into a state where it functions. As you may have guessed, I wanted to specifically cover our end-game; Where it is all headed, and what it will be like late game.

Now, I would like to remind you, this is not a final decision, just a direction we wanted to take. We want the player to have a choice, but the goal of the game is to survive. But survival is a never-ending struggle. So, how do you measure how you “win” at something that never ends.

A Little Insight Into Sprites

Greetings! I am Stephanie Dziezyk, Mythwing Interactive’s head artist, here to share some of the slightly more visually interesting aspects of the game’s development. I have been creating the conceptual art and rough sprite work, and would like to share what I’ve been up to these past three weekends.

Thus far, I have created the concepts for the main player characters – the dragons, with some exploration in their marking variation, and distinguishing features between male and female.

Art stream!

Hey guys, this is Jason, come and watch our artist, leccathu, stream more dragon pixel art!  picarto.tv/threetailart I’ll also be there to answer any questions you’d like to ask!

Art, Math, and Unity

– Post by Jonathan Programmer

At first, a specialized sprite shading program doesn’t sound like the sort of project that makes sense in a 3D game engine like Unity, but as it turns out, Unity has a few things that make prototyping that kind of project remarkably fast, given what we were trying to accomplish with it.

• A graphics pipeline capable of handling lighting and applying shaders
• Robust built-in classes for handling and modifying 2d textures, and drawing to them
• 3D vector and floating point methods and functions
• A 3D worldspace model with support for positioning light sources

I’m actually a bit astonished at how far into the project I was able to get in just two days; without the initial setup usually required for this kind of application, I could get right down to the art-program side of it; lots of math on normal vectors, converted into the RGB colorspace of the normal map, which is then applied to the bump map layer of the shader for our source texture. The result, then, is that an artist can “shade” the image they created as they normally would, but behind the scenes the computer is charting surface directions that will later allow the image to respond to lighting based on its direction.

All of that is possible -without- unity; .NET, for instance, runs on DirectX beneath the hood, so it would be possible for us to recreate all of the essential precursor pieces in .NET as well… or at an extreme, start from scratch with a C++ Windows API application and pull DirectX or OpenGL bindings into it, and code everything by hand. But therein lies the reason Unity was so convenient, at least for this prototype; we don’t have to create the tools to create the tools.

Thoughts on unity3d for a 2d game

Hey guys, so I’m thinking of changing some things up if I can, rather then the normal updates(we will instead only do those when something important comes up, XD) I’m going to try talking more about things that come up while we make our game and dealing with things that go with it.

Today, after talking last night and hashing it out, we decided it’s be a grand idea to add dynamic lighting to our 2d game. we had a few options, a gradient mask that would follow the sun’s track, by  far the easiest, but also the worst looking, our other options was making a ‘normal map’ program, or using one called sprite lamp, a fascinating little program that creates a normal map by interpreting how you shade you 2d image using 2 or more of the same sprite with different lighting, up to 5 of them.

So, leaving up the decision to the lead programmer (always do that with caution http://www.xkcd.com/1319/ ) and we decided to make our own! The goal seems to be making a stand along version, but we decided to prototype it in unity, the program is meant have a artist ‘shade’ the sprite in the program, and it turns that shading into a normal map.

So 4 hours in, we run into unity wonkyness, first of, that unity uses a weird algorithm for it’s normal maps, as I’m told, RGB = Y, A = X in unity normal maps, we spend a good deal of those 4 hours thinking we have a bug before finding out it’s unity. So then our lead programer starts testing things, and then it seems the sprite he’s loading is too small! XD

This seems to be a effect of using a pre-built engine for your project, it will save you loads of time in that is spent making a engine, but there will be bugs and workarounds and some hassle as you try to fit the game to the engine or vise versa. My thoughts are that this is a lesson in deciding what engine to use, always think long and hard, engine making I’ve been told can add 1-2 years to your production, but there’s always a downside to other options.

Hope this was more interesting reading then usual! I’ll try to do this more if you guys like it! I think I’ll make our programmer share his thoughts on this project later, so look forward to that!

Jason, Mythwing Design Lead.

 

1/5/16 art stream and Q&A

happy new year guys, we have another art stream and q and A going on, so if your interested, hop on https://picarto.tv/ThreeTailArt to watch her create a dragon sprite, and ask us stuff!