Demo Build Update!

We updated the demo build on our website! Play it here. If your browser is unable to load the game, please try another browser or the downloadable version linked on that page. Recent changes to Chrome do not play nicely with the Unity Player, and we have not yet been able to make a WebGL build. Major updates in this new version are listing below.

New Level after Tutorial

After the acquiring the bond, at the end of the tutorial, players now exit the level into a new area. This new area is visually and auditorily distinct from the tutorial, and it features puzzles that teach players fundamental uses of the bond. Both this new level and the tutorial are still being iterated upon based on playtests, but they are nearing completion. This will likely be the last level available in the free demo of the game.

Parallax:

Perspective cameras are now used to show depth between the players and the background. The level that the players move around within is kept at a depth very close to the players, but the background elements are positioned far behind so that they appear to move relative to the camera a vastly different rate. This change means that we know need to pay much closer attention to the depths of objects than we did when using orthographic cameras. After the switch the major work was flattening the parts of the scene that should not appear to parallax relative to the players.

Move to Unity 5:

We’ve been wanting to upgrade to Unity 5 for a couple months now, so transitioning to the MAGIC Lab seemed like the perfect time to upgrade the project and move forward with all the neat new features. Unfortunately, we had not anticipated that the move to PhysX 3.3 would essentially break our primary mechanic! The updated joint physics caused the bond, and all objects that used similar code, to behave erratically when attempting to wrap around something in the world. After tweaking a couple numbers, changing some code, and surviving more than few headaches, we were able to restore the bond’s proper behavior.

Moving into RIT’s MAGIC center!

Greetings friends, families and subscribers. This is Arun bringing you this week’s update from Amirelia and the team.

This week was pretty eventful. Started with a hectic Monday, when the team scrambled about, polishing the game for its IndieCade submission. Having successfully done that, we’ve then been settling in at the MAGIC lab at RIT. But before we’re ready to resume work from where we left it off, there were a few other things we needed to take care of:

Unity 5

Over its lifetime, Amirelia has switched back and forth between Unity 4.6 and 5, several times. We’re moving back to Unity 5 once (again) and for all. Why, you ask? For lack of a better reason, I took the liberty to justify this action using a colourful graph and some bogus math:

In reality, though, in the past, RIT was generous enough to give us Unity 5 Pro Beta access while we were working on it as our capstone project. However, lack of webplayer in Unity 5’s Beta at that time, caused us to move back to 4.6 for our GDC demo. Now that Unity 5 has released and is fully supported, we decided to move back to it and feel this’ll be a better alternative in the long run. Thus, this week, Sam and Ben have been working on the non-trivial task of migrating the project to Unity 5.

Kicking It Off

Bryan and Bob have been researching successful Kickstarter campaigns to help us plan our own. We had a few ideas using which Bob will be storyboarding a first draft for our promotional video. You can read more about in our previous blog post.

Intimate Shading

I’ve been working on a potential shader for the Intimacy levels. The goals of the level itself will be described in a future post when Bob’s Intimacy level reaches a finer level of polish. But I can give a brief description of the shader in the meantime.

The shader’s primary goal is to limit players’ visibility radius as they separate, incentivising intimacy and closeness in this space. We tried to create this effect using Unity lighting, but even with all light removed, it wasn’t dark enough. So after a lot of thought, Sam and I decided we should work with transparencies instead of lighting.

So we created a large black sheet that covers everything around the characters. We started with a simple stencil shader, but didn’t like the uniform look it gave us. We wanted a smooth gradient along this visibility, something that mimics a light source. Then after multiple iterations, I arrived at this:

Players Together Players Separated

Original plan was to make the shader behave similar to having a spotlight follow each character. But, because of how blending works, it caused the overlapping areas to be darker, as opposed to brighter. Thus, I could not use two sheets following the players and instead had to merge all the math into one entity instead. This led to some very interesting, metaball like results. We were happy with its organic look and feel, so we kept it.

For the smooth gradient effect (which isn’t prominently visible in the gifs), I used math identical to Light Attenuation or Fall Off. I found a (not so dense) Source Engine article and followed their strategy of exposing Constant, Linear and Quadratic coefficients (for anyone interested, the link will be down at the bottom). This gives us a good amount of control over the shader, allowing us to tweak how narrow, wide and bright their vision circles should be. I also threw in some noise into the equation to give it a radial pulsing an effect.

Additionally, this effect favours being closer, as proximity increases the characters’ circle of vision. I look forward to seeing it fully implemented with Bob’s level.

Signing off,

Arun

References:

Source Engine Attenuation

Updates & Future Work

Many events have been going on recently, including our capstone presentation of Amirelia, our graduation, and our submission to the IndieCade Festival. Furthermore, we have recently begun working as part of RIT’s Co-op Start-up program that will allow us to continue working on Amirelia and hopefully release an early access version around mid August.

For the early access release, we would ideally like to have four levels for the players to experience. Once we’ve achieved that goal, we’d like to create more levels and release a full version later in the year. However, the program we’re working with at RIT ends in August, and so we’ll need some funding in order to be able to finish the game. So, with great anticipation, we’d like to announce that we’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign! We intend to have this campaign up and running by mid June with a duration of about 15-20 days. We’re excited to continue our work, and we hope that we will receive enough support to achieve our goals.

As for our website, look for a new video and screenshots in the next few days! We’ll be updating the blog more often too, especially as we get closer to the Kickstarter launch.