Cyber Knights: Flashpoint - May Progress Report

The May progress report for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint talks about production milestones.

Knights,

We’re waving goodbye to May and welcoming June and so it is time for another monthly progress report. We’ve been in a ton of areas, including improvements in animation integration, level building and automation tooling to help our team develop content for the game faster.

May Progress

During May we made substantial progress testing our over-map story and dialog system which is used to inject story events and mission chatter directly into the game map. This required some new loading and asset management code, to ensure that both characters on the map and characters off the map (like your team’s Face and Contacts) were still able to appear correctly.

Another feature that saw significant improvement during May is the snap to cover movement mechanic. While Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is tileless, we’ve found in testing that a snap-to-cover mechanic is a necessary one to ensure player’s expectations are met in regards to taking cover and controlling sight lines. When combined with raycast based line of sight detection and feedback about targets, snap-to-cover gives us a best of both worlds hybrid with the benefits of tiles where players would use them, and with the freedom of tileless where players would want it.

Our animation team is completing an overhaul of the weapon’s targeting suite during May to allow characters to raise or lower their weapons up to 45 degrees when selecting high or low targets. Using reference frames and additive animation techniques, the engine can dynamically slide across the scale between straight out aiming to high or low or anywhere in between.

As our first set of playable levels comes together, we’re working hard to make sure they’re as beautiful as they are playable. We’ve just completed our first four ambient-only lighting setups which will act as the baseline lighting for different levels and thematic feelings established. Unity provides a rich set of tools for both lighting and color grading and we’re experimenting with different tools to apply LUT and color correction in both cut-scenes and gameplay.

Sea green, Day Blue, Dark Night and Radioactive Haze

May also included some heavy lifting on our shader implementation which is a critical pre-alpha task. Finalized physically based rendering (PBR) shaders that are both performant and beautiful and still support our feature requirements are necessary for all the Cyber Knights: Flashpoint platforms to live together. We’re experimenting with replacing our custom, hand-built shaders with more flexible ones created in Amplify Shader Editor which might give us more flexibility as we approach the wide variety of platforms and hardware in our target set.

Our team has grown substantially for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, but the core machinery of the studio is still the two of us, Andrew and Cory. We don’t really plan to change that for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, and so we continue to put a major focus on automation wherever possible. In May, one area that got some serious attention was the Level Builder’s light probe placement and alignment system. The levels and environments you’ve previously seen us demonstrate and show off to Executive Producers and Twitch streams have all used manually placed probes, which we’ve found takes a lot of time to create and maintain. Recognizing that we will need MANY levels for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint to live up to our ambition, we’ve created a new light probe automation layer that will save many hours and deliver a level of fidelity in probe placement that would be challenging to achieve consistently by hand. 

Each dot in the screenshot is a light probe -- I think we want to automate this one :D

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Thanks Farflame!