A different perspective on Unity development.!

I only saw them in magazines... until we visited the VR demo at the Chicago Museum of Art... decades ago... wow. We could see Silicon Graphics machines through a window in a room that also had an Apple (that's right, Apple, not Mac) computer farm driving the demonstration. I was more excited about the machines than the actual VR demo (go figure)!

 

Well folks... all I can say is "holy crap". If you can spare the $3 to check out here I think you will be surprised. It's not done yet obviously. But the scale (or at least feel of it for example towns are heavily populated with NPCs) is more than I expected and it is also way more polished than I expected. In short no offense intended to anyone but it is one of the most impressive things I have seen around here as far as presentation and perceived scale at least.

The video on Steam doesn't really portray what I got. I am not saying it is awesome and rivals AAA at this point. It is unfinished. A work-in-progress. I am just saying when finished I think this will be well received and is quite impressive for one college student working part-time in my opinion. It's the "feel" of it more than anything. Of course, I also went into it not expecting much of anything besides walking around a single tiny area with no interaction of any kind.

Hmm... I could record a video of it if anyone cares for a glimpse behind the curtain.

 

Aras did mention that a new tiled forward might appear with the C# render loops

 

I'm actually curious what one would use a physicist for in developing games?

I can begrudgingly accept software developers calling themselves engineers. Engineer is unfortunately a pretty widely abused term. But physicist is pretty specific. And most games don't use any physics above and beyond the high school level.

 

I'm a software coniologist.

 

Are you kidding me man, they figured out how to shoehorn physicists into stock picking. They can certainly figure out how to shoe horn them into video games.

 

Screenshots remind me of neverwinter 2. A bit messier version of it, anyway. If you're talking about that demo made by one guy in spare time.

I think if you go too far into visual effects, at one point you'll need a physicist.

 

Okay, so I checked it out again and this time recorded it. Just went to YouTube and vid is now uploading... then onto processing.

Will post it here when it is ready.

Normally I skip the cinematic sequences in games but I know many folks around here like them so I at least viewed several seconds of them. For an RPG I don't mind them so much (unless it is during gameplay!) and think they kind of help to set the mood and backstory. Seems a bit more useful for something the scale of an RPG.

..... and it's ready .....

Like I said not perfect, certainly not complete but a heck of an impressive start for one person part-time.

The lag and timing issues with animation are the result of recording while playing the game.

 

I absolutely love the voices. I had always considered doing my own voices, even female voices with a filter... but this is super cool and kind interesting in a B-Movie kind of way. I would like to see more things like this. Shadow jaggies, some graphical limitations are evident, camera work is not AAA... but, yet, it looks totally playable and the developer isn't letting anything stop him. No excuses looks like this.

 

That's certainly possible. Is it a role that a large studio would normally have?

At this stage I would simply call them mathematicians or analysts. The financial sector draws a lot of chemical engineers as well, the strong mathematics and analytical skills seems to be valued.

Perhaps I'm just being to purist and should get down off my high horse before I hurt myself. I was just surprised that there would be a defined role at a game studio called physicist.

 

The guy that used to work for us was a professor of physics specializing in light. He got into shaders as a way to visualize. During the summer he worked for us a contractor building shaders and optimizing code. If I recall, he was friend of one of our creative directors. We weren't actually hiring for a graphics engineer, and definitely not a physicist, but it was fun for him, and a opportunity we couldn't pass up.

 

Yeah ya know I think you hit the nail on the head. I've seen so many posts here about RPGs but either nothing is done except some graphics (terrain, models, whatever) or there is a simple environment basically barren with a nice quality character walking around. And yet this dude has a good amount of progress toward a real game. There are other areas and combat in already.

Like you said the graphics aren't perfect, the camera work isn't perfect and other issues (NPCs not stopping or turning to face you when speaking) but who cares? You can see the game in there beyond all of that stuff. I mean sure do a decent job on things put some effort in but you can't focus on making everything perfect or you will get nowhere. That becomes just another excuse to iterate forever on the same bits. This looks way more interesting and impressive to me than if he had made just one small area that was flawless looking with perfect camera control and NPC interaction (with say 3 distinct NPCs in the entire area).

He has really captured the essence of a AAA RPG game. And although I say graphics aren't perfect the game looks excellent to me. It doesn't need to look any better. Mainly because what would be gained from it? Nothing as far as I can tell.

This was good for me because I also get caught up in that iterating on one thing for way too long. And ya know it really is a project killer. "Just do it"

 

Hmmm, I would be impressed if I didn't make this in three days which had a combat system / dialogue system / AI and basic story.. I'm not saying it was very good, which in three day's y'know you're not going to get that far..

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/shadows-stuff.370855/

Also if I'm being straight up honest, I always find in games like RPG's it's the artwork that takes forever.. Not so much the code, plenty examples of stuff already done even though in this instance I did it all myself (well the code bit).!

Of course when you start adding anything above boggo standard "RPG" systems the code base can be pretty heavy.

 

It's some impressive work that kid did for sure. I don't think people should down play it. It's not an afternoon's work.

As a 'lone wolf' dev, I do think that it's possible to achieve far more with far less than people think. Honestly, I think that the kid will look back on his work in this game in a year or two and be embarrassed, the stuff he'll be doing once he's really learned how to fully use the technology will be way, way better quality.

I think the quality of the work I've been doing lately is extremely high. For a one man show, it's pretty crazy and I'm still far from honest to god expert level. What's possible to execute on a tight ass budget will only go up as more assets are sold at bargain rates on the asset store and other similar stores.

Learning to cut the right corners is a huge skill, and the guy who built Hero certainly cut a lot of corners. If they were the right ones or not, we'll have to see when it gets released. Ultimately, gamers will decide. Either way, what he's done is not an afternoon's work and it's not trivial.

How impressive it truly is or not will have to wait till gamers get their hands on it and really play it. If it's fun and he succeeds then it'll be very impressive, if it's not fun then it's just a bunch of assets thrown together.

 

To who exactly and how much do you want to bet that you're right? I'm game for the challenge if you want me to prove you wrong ..

I have a bit of a Barney Stinson complex, CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!..

 

Let's all wave our developer epeens around! Woo!

 

@frosted I agree. Definitely what he ultimately ends up with as far as the play experience is what matters. I am not sure really what folks around here expect from a student working part-time. Heck if he wasn't a student and was experienced even I still think it is a heck of a great start. Are people actually expecting one person to build a Skyrim killer or something? I would think not since that is exactly what everyone tells these new (and even experienced) devs to not try to do because the scope is way too much.

So many people seem to have the dream of making some big RPG game and I think it is interesting that here is a guy who is actually pulling it off. Sure he cut some corners but that is just to be expected.

 

LOL!

 

If I'm being straight up honest, at least they're doing something which out the bat put's them above many.. Shows they have aptitude and some sort of skill, RPG's are one of THE hardest games to make so it's sort of impressive within itself.

For a long standing experienced dev, yeah I would expect a hell of a lot better in the space of two / three months even if it is a lone indie..

I've always wanted to make an RPG that pokes fun at every other RPG.. Just sounds like fun ..

 

That's the spirit! Sure man if you can truly build out everything in here in a weekend (or whatever you consider to be a trivial amount of effort) in Unity (with all of the issues you know you will be battling) do it. It's a good amount of world size split into the various areas, the heavily populated towns and outside areas, etc.

My video only scratches the surface of it. The beginning 10 minutes or so.

 

Okay, when you said trivial and @frosted commented about more than an afternoon's work I thought you meant trivial as in be something you could duplicate over a weekend. lol

 

It's actually expected of students to have top quality work. Having a RPG that looks bad is far less valuable than having say a mobile game that looks good. Always quality over quantity.

 

, that's why I quoted "trivial" only.. Yeah, fair bit more than a weekends work it seems. I was kind of doing one a while back ago (as shown in the thread) then got sidetracked. Probably a couple of months work, if that?

 

It's very easy to underestimate the difference in the investment of time between making something that gets the point across and something that is polished.

E.g. the gameplay of our game relies on a special kind of physics. It was a matter of minutes getting this to work in principle, using the built in physics of Unity.
But to actually get the gameplay to behave EXACTLY the way it needed to be, all the time, and to include seemingly minor features which can have a large impact on the overall feeling on polish, I had to implement a custom solution that took me a week of development time.

So there was the difference between a few minutes and a week of work for a relatively simple mechanic for a small game. Now imagine doing that for a much larger game.

 

You should delete this post, I'm a gambler and I like longshots. But this is a safe bet

 

Yeah I understand that completely. That's what I was saying earlier in thread about not iterating "forever" on one bit. Of course, you need to get it right within reason but this is where the time gets flushed down the drain... continually tweaking the same one piece over and over and over instead of going on to the next bit and the next bit after that.

 

Part of the question though is what polish has the right amount of bang for the buck, and how can you compensate.

If you drop polish but add more features or increase scope, will it end up both saving time and producing a better product?

The skill in figuring out what corners can be cut while still delivering a game people enjoy is absolutely non trivial, even if it's not all that tangible.

 

Well, I could just use one of the previous six prototypes and wait a month .. It all comes down to how much "custom" stuff you add, if I used pre-made artwork it's not an issue.. If I didn't I wouldn't stand a chance.!

It really depends on what you're doing like anything else, back on the topic of this thread though.. I've not "properly" built anything in Unity for quite a while now, so it would be interesting to get back up to speed with all the latest improvements and see what's going on.

I'm not sure how "much" of it is an issue any more.

 

Awesome! I'm looking forward to playing your tiny RPG this weekend! The result of you testing the latest version of Unity. Meanwhile I'll be working on a very simple 2D game... or maybe going fishing. lol

 

While you guys are screwing around with your wittle gamies, this weekend I'm making a fully open world MMO and building a television studio to produce a documentary series about the development of the game. I should have the game finished by Tuesday and the show will be out on A&E on Friday. Easy peasy.

 

Who's waving now?

 

Speaking of when SWC came out... I've always wondered where "starts_goo" came from in the Android package name.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lucasarts.starts_goo

 

Half of me is so annoyed by the skipped frames, poor shadows, a "foam river" (?), that it was hard to actually enjoy how amazing that game is. But then again, if he had a friend experienced in Unity whose work would be only to optimize the game (implement culling, get shadows right, bake some lightmaps in or out of Unity, fix some shaders), his game would be market-ready.

The other half of me went back in time, 6 years to be exact, when I was in university, and everyone just made games. No super-complex systems, no camera optimizations, no audio of studio level, no AAA graphics assets built from the ground up. Just games. I'm almost starting one right now because of it.

Amazing.

 

Heh... Naming of a game is pretty much the last step. We had two games in development at the time, an RPG and an RTS (commander). Internally they were called StaRTS and StaRPG. Short for Star Wars RTS. We still call it starts internally as all the docs and tickets use that name. Goo is for Google. (goo/ios/win)

 

Hey don't knock it, making a game to prove a point is a perfectly valid form of procrastination. . I've done it myself several times. I've no doubt he can do it, however I suspect his lighting to be a bit more epic. (I don't recall ever seeing him post anything that wasn't).

 

Those names are honestly more clever than anything I see on a box.

 

Starpig? Make it happen, Disney.

 

Well I think @ShadowK can do it too. Certainly a micro RPG very small area fully alive and functional. Although... thinking about it... not sure why I am convinced he can considering I haven't actually seen any game or even playable WIP demo at all that he made... not even a Flappy Bird clone (which admittedly I can't see him ever wasting time on to begin with). Hadn't really thought about it before. But something about the way he writes and the occasional screenshot he posts... I dunno it just seems pretty obvious there is a lot of experience behind those.

 

No way, he'll be too busy switching engines and possibly genres to have a chance. In a week it'd be a diablo clone in cryengine, two weeks later it'll be a open world in unreal.

If I don't see video I don't believe nuttin'!

 

There's a massively large expanse between talking about making a game and actually making that game, testing it, releasing it, and supporting it.

Kudos to the developer of "Hero". Even if GarBenjamin's $3.99 was the only sale he'll ever get, he's still made more and accomplished more than the most magnificent unreleased game ever will.

 

Ummmm....not to be harsh since it is just a college student but would you really play that game? I wouldn't. I bet he is learning a ton though.

 

Very true @Ony nobody can deny that. Although I do think there are people who have the view "I'll either make something L33T or I'll make nothing at all!" Pretty sure I have seen comments along those lines around these forums. I agree though doing it just doing what you can hey at least you actually did it (something). And next time you'll be better.

On another note (and I got your point just sharing)... Hero has already been Greenlit and has a lot of positive comments on Steam. Scheduled for release at end of the year. Maybe he plans on spending summer break focusing on the camera and other things. Anyway I hope he does well. Wonder if he was one who came here at one time and talked about making an RPG and heard "you'll never do it punk!", "get real", etc? lol

 

Well of course I would when finished. What reason would there be not to play it other than RPGs generally taking a lot of time? From what I understand though this will be a simplified adventure so should be better suited to the kind of time I'd be willing to invest in such games.

I kind of see it like people stripped out a piece of RTS games and Tower Defense was born. This guy is stripping out the core / essence of an "epic" RPG in the same way.

 

It didn't look fun, and that is what I look for. Fun factor has nothing to do with whether he can stitch some terrains together, add some terrible voice acting, and idle animations

 

Remains to be seen. If it is not then of course I wouldn't. As far as I know this is a WIP. It is not scheduled for release til end of the year. That gives him several months to focus more on making it more interactive and balancing gameplay. This will likely either be a big success or a big failure depending on what he does between that last demo release and end of the year.

 

Despite doing everything rough and having zero polish I thought that rpg had some atmosphere and I hope he carries on adding bits and ignoring this forum

 

@hippocoder
I also added a better shadows filtering with native support on top of it which works on all Unity platforms. Valve one only works with DX11.

Valve default filte:


My filter(with softness level configurable):







Unity standard tap filtering:


Side note, I'm using only a 512*512 shadowmap, vs 2048 for valve ones.

 

That's sexy. It gets me going tato. I assume we don't need VR to make use of this stuff? Did you read Aras's notes about opening up the renderer a bit over on the group?

I think we're seeing forward fight back a bit since many games do not seem to be requiring deferred after all. And I mean console, not mobile. Really need that speed.

You don't really need a ton of lights when you have enlighten, so deferred is surprisingly not that useful. My game has a lot of actual content, and doesn't really need a lot of lights or too much post. I think I can survive without SSRR and maybe even DOF.

 

@hippocoder
You don't need VR with the moddifications I've made to Valve renderer yes.
We use a combination of static lightmapping with directional lightmaps only on lit places (then fade to current ambient) for unlit places (so we don't have to lightmap the whole scene). Supports up to 3 dynamic lights (can have more but have to manually disable/enable them while moving around in scenes) with shadows in one pass pretty similar to what Vavle does.
And yes, if you manage well your lights, you don't need fat gbuffers.
Forward+ renderer with automatic light management where the engine disables far lights and enable X amount max of lights close to the camera is the way to go for consoles and mobile or VR on PC.
Actually, if we got access to the depth buffer for free (without re-rendering the scene twice) we can do a hefty amount of screen effects including DOF and other effects.

 

Actually what is the source code license?