Hey all,
I briefly went to one of the MGSA meetings a year or two ago. Me and my brother Sam are the two halves of Knife Media, a small dev in Constantia, Cape Town.
We'd like to introduce you guys to our new title, Super Regency Deluxe! Right now we are approaching alpha stage and I figure the best place to start showing our progress is here at home in SA.
Super Regency Deluxe is an RTS game with (we hope) exceptionally beautiful graphics, fast paced gameplay and a competitive focus. Instead of relying on complicated tech trees and buying patterns, SRD is a game of simple, effective strategy and outmaneuvering your opponent. There are a few other crucial gameplay elements we are working on, but they aren't yet fully developed enough to talk about.
Below are some screenies, we are hoping to have a playable alpha sometime in the new year. Let us know what you think!
WIP screenshots:
Characters:
1. Swiss level theme set
2. Arabic level theme set (very early WIP)
3. Armageddon level theme set (very early WIP)
I briefly went to one of the MGSA meetings a year or two ago. Me and my brother Sam are the two halves of Knife Media, a small dev in Constantia, Cape Town.
We'd like to introduce you guys to our new title, Super Regency Deluxe! Right now we are approaching alpha stage and I figure the best place to start showing our progress is here at home in SA.
Super Regency Deluxe is an RTS game with (we hope) exceptionally beautiful graphics, fast paced gameplay and a competitive focus. Instead of relying on complicated tech trees and buying patterns, SRD is a game of simple, effective strategy and outmaneuvering your opponent. There are a few other crucial gameplay elements we are working on, but they aren't yet fully developed enough to talk about.
Below are some screenies, we are hoping to have a playable alpha sometime in the new year. Let us know what you think!
WIP screenshots:
Characters:
1. Swiss level theme set
2. Arabic level theme set (very early WIP)
3. Armageddon level theme set (very early WIP)
Comments
You don't perhaps have any ingame screenshots yet?
Running 80-90fps at 1080p max settings with an R9 280x. Obviously performance optimisation comes later but we are happy for the moment.
I'm less fond of the WIP soldier character. He's got floating pieces which don't feel hand-crafted (because things only float in animations and video games). For example, Besiege had a similar sort of well rendered/hand crafted feel, and but they had a different solution for the characters which I feel might suit your environments more: http://i.imgur.com/8ca7h0h.gif
I know keeping the character in pieces is a way to reduce the cost of content creation and animation, but I feel that if you're showing so much love to your environments you can't reduce the fidelity on the characters as far as you have in the WIP without them sticking out.
Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of floating limbs in general. I know Rayman Origins got away with it recently, and there are a couple Minecraft clones that do it, so my opinion about disconnected body parts definitely has a bias.
My biggest issue right now is I have no formal graphics training. Making people is really hard for me because they are so complex. My goal with the characters is to make them look like toys (as in the besieged gif you posted). Maybe adding some little rods between the limbs would make them look like dolls?
I really like the besieged characters now that you posted it... perhaps I should aim for a different style? I want to retain the general design for them, which is along the lines of a chess piece. I'm not sure how to have limbs without bastardising the original intent. Gonna have to have a think about that...
Maybe I should go for the little green army men approach? Could look quite cool. It might detract from the characterisation of the current models however.
The other soldiers:
Maybe I could do a tut on getting your scene lighting in this style someday for you all? Would you guys be keen to see my workflow?
It might be possible to outsource the art style if you don't feel confident yourself. Following an art style might be easier than trying to invent one. I mean, your team has released commercial games before, so you might be able to leverage some of the talent in this community to search for a style. I know artists like @Pomb would kick ass at this type of thing, and Retro Epic has produced brilliant game board style art for their game "A Day In The Woods" (which if you haven't looked at you should definitely check out). I have no idea what your plans are, but if spending a bit of money finds you a good direction that might be worthwhile?
I also might be wrong in thinking the game would feel more cohesive with a different art style for the characters. Please don't assume I know what I'm talking about.
Also maybe have a look at Armello http://armello.com/ , just for reference for board-game come to life video games. I honestly think that the environments you are producing are more appealing than Armello, especially your grassy fields and hills (although again, I might not understand this audience).
The art style looks really cool, but is this the best setup to play with?
Armello has a way more cartoony look than SRD - I think that using that style on the characters wouldn't really fit with the overall style. Really beautiful looking game though!
Right now the development is at a bit of a crossroads - I can go completely realistic or so unrealistic that it fits in an oddball kind of way. I'll see how things go over time and adjust accordingly... The camera view is actually quite different to the screenshots (these were purely for presentation purposes). In the real in game camera we have a top down rotational view with a tilt angle of about 45 degrees. Kind of like World in Conflict but with less overall freedom of movement, because I think that if users could literally fly all over the place it would be confusing towards casuals. A more strict control scheme will be applied.
In terms of zoom level, you can go all the way from a few feet above ground to a view of the entire map. We want this to be completely immersive in terms of detail - you can literally see the grass stalks extruding from the texture on the terrain and sticking out with Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM), it's quite beautiful :)
What's great about the project right now is that the performance is quite good. Regardless of how close or far you are the framerate stays somewhat steady. The terrain has a good LOD system and it doesn't have any problems with the mip maps/POM at midrange viewing. Our goal with this game is to employ as many AAA rendering styles as possible into an RTS as this is not commonly done.
The DOF is of course also for presentation.
POM (Parallax Occlusion Mapping) and triplanar mapping on the terrain:
Our favourite software at the moment - Substance Painter (highly recommended and being used in a lot of AAA titles these days):
And of course, really basic prototyping to get the feel of the game before introducing graphics. One of the best processes to learn when making a complex title - prototype, prototype, prototype!
Curious to see how you fit RTS into this view...
Some kind of strategy 3rd person game is appealing to me in concept.
Grass with SSAO
A castle interior for use in the main menu (still very much WIP)
I'm just curious how you're thinking of handling this, most of the previous things have been quite open at the top with a lot less focus there.
Still on track to have something playable early in the year? I'm keen to see things in action :)
Right now we are integrating Photon networking into the backend. From there the user interface and full functionality will be put together. I'll host an alpha for local players sometime soon after that (as soon as the first two or three levels are functioning). No ETA but working our asses off! Two man teams can only go so quickly unfortunately.
EDIT: one more just because POM is the most beautiful shader ever!
I would love to see how the gameplay is going to look!
Do you have a playable version of this or not yet?
Either way, well done so far!
Karl
We'll have a playable alpha ... Soon! I'm trying to manage studying, working a job and also making a game. Not exactly easy!
And because everyone loves chicken...
Can you give some feedback on your experience and usage of Substance Painter/Designer? (you can PM me if you don't want to "pollute" your game thread with such a response.
And, Good looking game.
Keep it up.
Can you give some feedback on your experience and usage of Substance Painter/Designer? (you can PM me if you don't want to "pollute" your game thread with such a response.
And, Good looking game.
Keep it up.[/quote]
1. Triplanar mapping does that as far as I know too... I'm not the shader programmer, unfortunately. I have no stats on performance for you, sorry! We use RTP (Relief Terrain Pack) for this. I'll try let you know once we do performance testing later on the year...
2. OK, so I can only state this in one way: Substance designer and painter are, by a great margin, the best software suite I have ever used in my entire life (I've been using computers since I was three years old). I know it's very hard to convey urgency in a paragraph of text, but if you are doing any form of 3D work you need this software. Notice the fact that it's a need - I cannot go back to using bitmap editors for texturing ever again. Do yourself a life-changing favour and buy this software as soon as possible.
They do pretty much everything you could ever want; Designer allows you to effectively visual code textures from scratch. No bitmaps required. The learning curve is a little tricky, but the results can be incredible. Add to this the fact that substances are dynamic, meaning you can perform real-time modifications to your game without adding more bitmaps into the memory. Want to rust a metal frame over time? Easy. Want to make vines grow on a broken wall? Already been done. They take up very little space and are performance optimised. Beautiful.
Painter is my favourite, however. Previously my texture workflow involved GIMP, sweat and trial and error. It was an arduous task to make anything remotely complicated because of the constant errors, problems with filling space correctly and the time consuming nature of it all. Painter is the exact opposite. It has effectively cut my work time to a fraction of what it used to be. Just today I made some stone steps. The texturing process took, I kid you not, 5 minutes. Here's the result:
The sheer ease of use and speed at which one can make clean, realistic and beautiful textures is simply mind blowing. It does this by treating the model itself like a canvas, filling the model via layer masks that can be changed easily and effectively. There are post-processing filters (hue/saturation/lighting, blur, distort etc.), dynamic masks (highlight edges, rust, metal scratches) and a library of universally applicable premade substances to use. If you can't find the one you want, share.allegortihmic.com has a community portal where users distribute AAA quality substances for free. I love this software!
You cannot go wrong with any of their software. It's an absolute must-buy. If it's too costly, wait until the Steam sales. They almost always take 33% or more off.
[/quote]
Looking forward to that :) Those stairs look like I could walk up them :)
I have tried Designer a bit, And I think I need to look up some of the stuff on there doc's or make custom functions.
I will go and check out the release on Steam, I got the trial from there web site.
On your recommendation we actually started using this a few days ago, and it seems to already be making a great difference to workflow :)
Latest work on the throne room (3D pack about 4 days from completion!):
The timeframe has shifted a bit, but I want to get it out before year's end.
I'm busy doing some foliage concept work for the level set. My brother is busy with the menu coding and alpha test.
The selection circle for tower units and some nice lighting:
Today we hook up the menu frontend to the prototype gameplay scene. Testing can begin very very soon!
Today we hook up the menu frontend to the prototype gameplay scene. Testing can begin very very soon!
Our main FX stack is currently:
1. Scion Post-Processing (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/41369)
This one is nice because it renders all the costly PP in one call. Saves on performance. I'm also using some nice LUT colour FX grading to bring out the darker tones.
2. Unity SSAO
3. Global height fog
4. Sun Shafts (likely to be ditched for performance reasons and overdraw)
5. Post Anti-Aliasing (render path is deferred, which means no native AA).
As for the crispness, I am using Substance Painter at 2048x2048 for most textures. Where possible I'm adding detail normals to increase scalable detail.
Snow and rain shaders are handled by UBER: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/39959
A test map:
I'm quite keen to write up a good colour balance guide for MGSA. One of the hardest things for me to master was grading and management of texture colour in a pleasing manner. I reckon everyone should focus on this during development and it doesn't seem many indie devs are aware of the theory behind this.
take the Witcher: Blood and Wine as an example:
I've tried to bring out some of that rich cyan in the fog. Remember that because this is an RTS, there isn't a skybox (at least not one that is planned). I'll have to paint in broad blue and cool temperature colours in the ground to keep the overall composition moderate. (with fog, in this case). Obviously this is a WIP for now.
The next step is producing a test map. We should be live by the end of the week, with a potential playable demo sometime next month... let's see!
I've been developing games since I was about 13 years old. It's only in the past year that I've gotten good at graphics :)
We should be hitting Greenlight sometime later this year. But before that, we'll likely have a South Africa focused test alpha for people to play.
Here's a (very early) shot of the first alpha test level:
Also, main menu UI!
Would be cool if some people could give feedback on how they feel about the blue tone in this shot:
I'm not sure where to move the colour direction to, because too much warmth can be a little garish. Personally I'm quite fond of it, but after spending many hours staring at a project your opinion can become quite biased!
I'm also quite fond of the warmth, but I guess it's also highly dependent on the mood you want to set for your game.
Perhaps you could also show the same scene at different times in the day / night?
A little more orange in the overall shot.
In other news, I managed to integrate volumetric lighting from a free shader pack: