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Paint the Town Red [Early Access on Steam]

Discussion in 'Works In Progress - Archive' started by MattCarr, Oct 16, 2015.

  1. MattCarr

    MattCarr

    Joined:
    Jul 5, 2009
    Posts:
    339
    We've just released a game we've been working on for most of this year, Paint the Town Red, on Steam in Early Access and the Humble Store.


    We originally made the game in 7 days for the 7DFPS game jam in late 2014. That version was pretty popular and we started thinking about a full version and what that would be. We didn't start working on it in earnest until April this year so where we're about 6 months into development now.

    Some of the more interesting things we're doing development-wise is voxel based enemies and our lighting system. I have a blog post that covers the basics of the voxel stuff here. I'll be going into more detail in a later blog post.

    I'll be writing a blog post about our lighting shortly, but the gist is we're using Unity 5's command buffers to draw our own point lights with our own shadowmaps. Each light can have a a baked shadowmap that renders static geometry and only needs to render once and then can render particular dynamic elements (currently mainly doors) when they move/rotate and only for the cubemap faces that see/saw them to another shadowmap which composites the result with the baked map for rendering. This allows for very fast point light shadows (relative to using standard light shadows in Unity that render everything every frame for all cubemap faces) that looks exactly the sameas if they came from Unity's lights and I have more control over resolutions which I can set per light as needed. I can also do things like remove specular highlights for certain lights so I can use them for faking emission without spec highlights ruining that effect.

    I'll probably put the lighting system on the Asset Store eventually once I have a bit more time.

    I also wrote a custom decal system to handle the persistent blood decals in a fast way and lots of little fancy effects for things like the how the mirror ball reflections the dance floor in the disco level. Outside of built-in Unity effects we're using Amplify Motion, Amplify Color, SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens, Rewired, Chman's SMAA implementation, Steamworks.NET and that's it I believe for 3rd party assets. I'm not a big fan of using 3rd party stuff typically because I normally find it causes too many performance and debugging issues so we're doing most things ourselves. I really like Rewired and Steamworks.NET though and I'm very happy with the image quality we have with the image effects we're using.

    I've also had to do a massive amount of optimisation to get around performance issues with built-in Unity features we're using like animation, navmesh and physics. I'm pretty happy with the performance we're getting considering the number of enemies that can all go back and forth between animated and ragdolled with full dismemberment and collision changes based on voxel changes, as well as the hundreds and hundreds of other physics props and weapons.

    So far the feedback for the game has been great. We're working on more levels and modes and will have co-op multiplayer as well. Current expectation/hope is to be finished and out of Early Access mid 2016.

    Happy to answer any game or dev questions :).







     
    RavenOfCode likes this.
  2. Neoptolemus

    Neoptolemus

    Joined:
    Jul 5, 2014
    Posts:
    52
    Haha this looks like fun. Were you aware Jim Sterling did a squirty play of your game? You can find it here:



    He appears to be enjoying it. Perhaps a little too much.

    The custom engine features sound interesting, I haven't really looked under the hood much other than a couple of custom shaders but would be interested to see what's going on under there.
     
  3. Bauschen

    Bauschen

    Joined:
    Aug 27, 2015
    Posts:
    5
    My game of the year

    Great work

    I'm very interested in your implementation of voxel based enemies.
    Can't wait for your blogpost:)
     
  4. MattCarr

    MattCarr

    Joined:
    Jul 5, 2009
    Posts:
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    Yep :). Although it's getting harder and harder to do so, I'm trying to make sure I see everything that's being posted and said about the game. Not necessarily watching all the videos though because I'd never get anything else done :). Did watch that one though as it was one of the first of the bigger ones posted.

    There's often a lot of value in doing custom versions of features that are otherwise available in the engine or on the Asset Store. Typically most things are made to be generic enough to work for a wide range of projects so there's often a lot of overhead for things you don't need.

    Thanks :). There's a blog post here that has some detail on the voxel enemies, but I'll go into more detail soon.
     
  5. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    7,790
    How are you trying to do that? That seems like a daunting task.
     
  6. MattCarr

    MattCarr

    Joined:
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    Posts:
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    It is :). There's lots of emails and posts on the Steam forum to reply to and I regularly search and see what's being said about the game. It takes a fair amount of time and mental effort to force myself to do it frequently, but it's paying off to being able to respond to launch issues quickly. After another couple of weeks it will be less important since hopefully there won't be many technical issues.
     
    theANMATOR2b likes this.
  7. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    7,790
    Thanks for the answer. :) I guess my question was also referring to those - unknown mentions of the game, such as in youtube videos, random web pages which you are unaware were covering your game - or comparing another game to yours.
     
  8. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

    Joined:
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    4,835
    Any reason there is no mac build
     
  9. MattCarr

    MattCarr

    Joined:
    Jul 5, 2009
    Posts:
    339
    I regularly search for mentions of "paint the town red" on Google from the past 24 hours or 1 hour, etc to find mentions. It also allows me to find cool stuff like this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/PaintTheTownRed

    It's coming in the next update. There's some shader work to be done to get things working right in OpenGL and I wanted time to properly test it before releasing.
     
    theANMATOR2b likes this.
  10. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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    Okay cool im going to pick it up when its released for mac
     
  11. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

    Joined:
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    Cool ass game.

    If you are like me and suck at games and want to find a strategy that works, all you have to do is throw chairs, bottles knives etc at the enemy and run away like a girly man. I finally beat teh terminator boxer. Hell of am endurance run, 21 minutes.
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2015