our production blog.... the cat's out of the bag ;)

Definitely not VS. Shadows, very dynamic camera movement & zooming, lots of critters running round everywhere & reacting to character position & it seems to gravity enabled as the character slides down the angled ship thing. Looks pretty interesting all in all. I like the camera work.

Oh come on.. now I'm confused. Is it VS or isn't? Desi lay cards on the table right now!

sorry, its Unity.... I started with VIS to work on it, but the concept grew to a point where I needed a 3D engine to handle it.... I'm still reading/lurking this forum regularily, adventure dedicated sites seem pretty rare these days...

It wasn't my intention to mislead you guys, my apologies... if this thread/post is inappropriate, feel free to remove it.

Desi: It's alright, no necessary to remove it.. but could you speak a little bit about your transition from VS to Unity, how did it go and stuff? Do you need any programming skills to be able to do something like this in Unity? Also did you use any templetes/plugins or whatever they called them in Unity? And what parts are exactly 3D? Is a character 3D? Man it looks just really great.. congrats.. btw how much did you pay for single unity licence?

I readed your blog mate, and gameplay is just amazing!!! But please tell us how you made that camera movents especialy into z axis. And when you do you also have depth of field effects. You used hi-res background image and foreground as well but when you move the camere into the scene its like its a realy 3d environemt with real 3d scene but its just made with plane with texture. So is there a kind of camera projection? And please tell how you did that projection camera mapping or what you used?

I also tired that unity asset but it looked complicated for me and couldnt find tutorial for 2d.5 games in it. just 2d or 3d tutorials.

Ligthen us mate Cheers and congratulations!!!

“

Desi: It's alright, no necessary to remove it.. but could you speak a little bit about your transition from VS to Unity, how did it go and stuff? Do you need any programming skills to be able to do something like this in Unity? Also did you use any templetes/plugins or whatever they called them in Unity? And what parts are exactly 3D? Is a character 3D? Man it looks just really great.. congrats.. btw how much did you pay for single unity licence?

„

Desi?

thanks!

well, it didn't take much longer to get used to it as VIS, but I'd recommend at least a basic understanding of scripting.. I use AdventureCreator as main Asset which adds a VIS style action system to unity. playmaker was used to create the Ant AI.

the character is prerendered in 3D, but in unity its basically a sprite running through a 3D set (which is also prerendered and projected)

the frog needed a homebrew script to control the animations, (its not a flat sprite)... (it has about 400 frames of 2K images) but the hole scene "just" needs about 130mb of VRAM...

“

I readed your blog mate, and gameplay is just amazing!!! But please tell us how you made that camera movents especialy into z axis. And when you do you also have depth of field effects. You used hi-res background image and foreground as well but when you move the camere into the scene its like its a realy 3d environemt with real 3d scene but its just made with plane with texture. So is there a kind of camera projection? And please tell how you did that projection camera mapping or what you used?

I also tired that unity asset but it looked complicated for me and couldnt find tutorial for 2d.5 games in it. just 2d or 3d tutorials.

Ligthen us mate Cheers and congratulations!!!

„

well it is actually a 3d scene.... the set was built twice... once in highres (300-400mio polys), and one reduced one (100K polys) which was optimized to work in camera... the Z movement is simply done by following the character... i wrote some camera scripts to create additional soft transitions and zooms...

the cam projection is quite simple and can be done in almost all 3d packages (even in compositing apps with 3d support like nuke)... you basically have 2 UV sets... one created based on the cam, and a good/handmade one which is used to bake down the result of the projection. (but the hole process is pretty tedious and time consuming because it required a lot of testing/adjustments)

depth of field is simply a unity image effect (pro only)... but it wasn't as easy as I originally thought.... I had to create my own lib of custom shaders (mostly based on samples found on the internet and forums which I modded for my needs)

derOesi: sorry for that Desi-calling I must have been drunk or something
I have some additional questions for you if it's okay.

a) How difficult is setting up conditions and connecting them with objects with AdventureCreator? Is it similar to Visionaire workflow?

b) For what exactly do you use scripting? Could you name some examples? I mean something that in VS you don't have to script but you have to in Unity in order to have same result.

c) I read that AdventureCreator is suitable for 2D and 3D adventure games, but what about 2.5D? For sake of clarity, by 2.5D I mean 2D backgrounds with 3D characters. Is that possible in AdventureCreator?

d) Hypotheticaly, would you recommend me go for Unity (with AdventureCreator) if I would tell you that my only reason for that transition from Visionaire would be better graphic performance and smoother animations? I don't really need any other fancy Unity features like bugg-less conversions to another platforms and stuff like that.

hi gusty, don't worry about it...

a) pretty similar i'd say.. AC and Unity is more "for everything" and needs more nodes organizing, external files, etc. . VIS is clearly more easy to start here.... on the other side Unity is way more flexible, but this also comes with increased complexity / time to setup things...

b) for some of the camera work, and custom triggers... nothing really fancy yet. the ants are cnotrolled with an AI system built with playmaker (which isn't that hard, and was truly fun )

c) and d) you should contact the AC dev if you are interested in it, (on the AC forum for example), he is always very helpful.

best,