While our former Producer Josef was curious to work in bigger teams, for bigger projects, Mara chose the other way round. She left Luxembourg and a big publisher to get a taste of the indie side of life. Welcome, Mara!
Read along to get to know our new Carrot a little bit more. Read More
Welcome to another overview of the design process for Good Company!
Managing a small or big company that manufactures robots in all variations and sizes means you also have to manage a lot of different products, intermediate goods, and materials. As a player of Good Company, you want to have a good overview of the items in your inventory to efficiently produce, research and create. Since production starts on a very basic level, where employees can combine plastic cases with wheels and batteries, and possibly ends with complex and specialized machines, the items you have to deal with might vary significantly in size and complexity. Therefore, we wanted to create a style for the representation of those items that show a good compromise between the abstract function of certain items and detailed visual representation of others.
It is easier to promote a new game if you have interesting screenshots and a catchy cover image. So I began planning what would be the first version of a key visual for our new game “Good Company” about three weeks ago. To come up with a good concept I first gathered reference from the game itself and from inspirations we had defined in the very early stages of the project. It was important for me that the final image would be a representation of the game and its looks but also introduce a slightly new aesthetic for possible graphics and advertisement images inside the game. The visual style of images that “lives” in the game, so to speak.
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Today I would like to recommend some great books about game development and the developers behind it:
Jason Schreier’s book about recent games is by far one of the best books on how tough making games can be. Read More
This blog post aims to be something like a cookbook for 2D Vectors. As such it will contain very practical recipes without diving into the theoretical background too much. There will be short introductions on how you can derive the formula, but you can also just skip those and go directly to the pseudo code, if that is all you need. Every recipe is nicely illustrated with interactive diagrams written in paper.js. Read More
Our artist Chantal made some beautiful looking rocks for the Heart of Scrap jungle environment. Here is a little insight on how she approached the visible destruction patterns on those rocks:
Hello again, it’s a meeeee Thermo-Man 😛
I made a mistake! I assumed, the shader creation would be easy, that i just have to calculate the distance from a BattleBlock center to its extends and map a nice color onto it. And boy, it was easy and fast. But then i realised, that this will work only for more or less cubic blocks. But what’s with the other blocks? Like laserguns with their 3×1 layout? My shader didn’t really handle that very well…
Hello again!
This time i’m diving deeper into the heatmap look development. To be able to easily distinguish your Battleconstruct form the background, i decided to go with 2 seperate shaders. One heightmap based for the level and one distance based for the BattleBlocks. Just made a quick photoshop mockup of how the viewmode would look inside the game:
In the upper left corner you can see the new viewmode toggle button to switch between different modes (eg. normal, heat, energy, hull integrity).
Next will be the shader creation in unity. Stay tuned 🙂
Cheers,
Patrick
Hey there,
my name is Patrick. I’m one of the artists here @ chasing carrots an currently i’m working on a thermography shader for HoS (Heart of Scrap). The idea behind this is, to give the player a quick and familiar overview over the heat-distribution of his BattleConstruct.
I’m aiming for something like this:
My first idea would be a distance based shader. The further away a pixel is from the center of an object, the darker it will be rendered. Then i map some nice colors over this gradient. Voila: Not that bad for the first shot:
Next steps will be: Develop this look further in the context of the game (with UI, environment and everything), then creating a realtime shader which can reproduce the look in an acceptable render speed.
Stay tuned…
Please enjoy some cheap-o-stereographic development insights with us 😀
