Ghost of a Tale - Development Update & Interviews

Seith provides a new development update for Ghost of a Tale, in which he also mentions an early release on Steam happening in the not too far future.

Just a couple of development news: Paul has been hard at work on writing the game’s dialogs and it’s all shaping up very nicely. I’ve even added queries into the time-of-day system so NPCs can greet you while mentioning the proper time of day (ie: “Good afternoon!”). 

I’ve done a pass on optimizing the UI and that paid off; I was able to shave off a handful of frames-per-second by reworking the entire system and separating each canvas into its own prefab.

Incidentally the UI system (inventory, dialogs, main interface, etc…) is starting to come into its own and feels more and more consistent.

So things are moving forward at a steady pace! The amount of work left to do is still rather daunting though. I think that within a few weeks I should be able to accurately assess the situation with regard to an early release.

Of course release plans have not been finalized by a long stretch yet but it is looking more and more like we’re going to do an early release of the game on Steam. In any case I will post many more details about that in an upcoming update!

And he mentions an interview in French and English. The latter one discussing amongst others, the technical aspect of creating the game and the Unity engine.

The game runs on the Unity engine. I feel very lucky that I started using Unity when it took a turn towards better visual fidelity. I had heard of the engine before and was very far from convinced (based on the quite outdated visuals). But within two years it became an excellent engine capable of outputting AAA graphics.

I love the simplicity of development; it’s mostly based on individual components/scripts which is (in my opinion) a very flexible approach. I know hard-core coders usually prefer C++ but I’m primarily an artist (although I do have experience coding tools using Python). So I learned C# in order to code in Unity and I never looked back. Unity is not perfect of course (no engine is) but in my opinion it’s getting freaking close! I believe the thing that still hinders Unity is based on the fact that it’s not quite yet used by many AAA studios. But as things evolve I think it will continue improving and add features that are really useful for larger, more technically demanding games.

One such feature I’m waiting for is a robust way to manipulate multiple scenes at once, which would be useful for games like Ghost of a Tale which rely on streaming parts of the world to keep things smooth.