Ghost of a Tale - Game Progress

Seith provided a development update for Ghost of a Tale, the game with the mouse.

On the other end, I’m happy to report that the game is making great progress (with the help of a few very talented people). So here are a few things that have been changed/improved since the alpha trailer:

• Gamepad support has been fully implemented. I never thought I would one day utter those words, but I actually prefer using the gamepad to test the game now.
• Several concept art pieces were created (thanks Adam!).
• Player control and animation have been completely overhauled; better collision detection, smooth transitions, new interaction animations, etc…
• Started implementing sneak mode (I can’t say much more about that yet).
• Started implementing dialog/interaction support. This is linked to the game’s UI and is still very much a work in progress.
• Dynamics are on! The mouse’s hood is now completely dynamic, it responds to the mouse’s movements; this saves a lot of work on the animation side and looks really neat to boot (thanks Enrique!).
• New fur (thanks Dariusz!), cloth and environmental shaders with multi-layered POM and tessellation support (thanks Andy!). This allows the texture work to really pop.
• New interactive bending vegetation (thanks Dominik!). Bushes and grass react to the player running through them. It really adds a nice touch.
• Player character awareness system; it’s a mouthful to just say that the mouse is aware of what’s around him, even if the player isn’t. So if you run about and the mouse notices something he’s going to turn his attention to it. In other words his body language will clue you in about interesting features you might have missed.

And that’s it for now…

Of course some of those things you guys might take for granted in games nowadays. But the thing is, in Unity you have to create pretty much everything from scratch. It’s a lot of work, but on the plus side it also means that you can create exactly what you need.

Finally, just a little picture of our mighty hero for you: