Liege - Post-Funding Update #23

John Rhee has posted a new post-funding update for Liege with news on the games develepment.

Development

As mentioned in previous posts, I've been working on implementing our framework and workflow in our new engine (Unity). For those interested on the technical side of things, I wanted to share a bit about what's going on behind the scenes. 

Going into our Unity port, I had a few key requirements apart from simply porting over existing functionality:

• Layered 2D environments with 3D character models
• In-game skeletal animation (for smoother animation and effects like slo-mo)
• Real-time, dynamic shadows 
• Efficient workflow that leverages Unity's WYSIWYG editing features 
• Acceptable performance with the above on our weaker hardware targets (mobile)

Below, you can see how our scene is composed in our editor with the above features in place:

(Click here for Image)

Going from left to right, we have: 

1. A system of cameras that controls the order in which the scene is drawn 

2. Parts of the scene that are normally drawn over characters (i.e. trees) 

3. 3D characters casting real-time shadows, rotated to align with our view (note the model is a placeholder) 

4. Collision bounds, which are automatically generated from a 2D tile map

5. Parts of the scene that are normally drawn behind characters (i.e. the ground)

Here's the game running in our editor (with an older iteration of Kalen's art):

(Click here for Image)

As you can see, our content aligns precisely to form the composite image that's seen in-game. This is very different from how 2D is normally handled, but it opens up lots of interesting graphical possibilities. 

As this update hopefully shows, things are taking some time as we try things and iterate, but the updates will be more regular as we get further along. Thanks as always for your support, and let us know your thoughts below!