In late December’16 we had been invited with Heart of Scrap to participate in the Indie Prize competition at Casual Connect in Berlin. For us this was a chance to showcase Heart of Scrap in its current state (which is still the gamescom version since all of us switched to working on Pressure Overdrive) and get good feedback while meeting lots of cool game devs. This was our second time at an Indie Prize. Last year we’ve been in Amsterdam and had a great time showing Cosmonautica.
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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…
Hi everyone, we are back at our studio in Stuttgart!
How time flies by. About a week ago, we were constructing our booth out of countless (mostly) handcrafted elements in hall 10.1 on the koelnmesse areal – which took us hours of screwing, attaching, glueing, connecting, fixing and adjusting. But eventually, we finished our first stand-alone booth, after we have attended Gamescom for two years as part of the Indiearena Megabooth.
It really was worth the effort. We can humbly say, that our place certainly had its very own appeal, amongst the other exhibitors around us. Which contributed to the diversity Gamescom 2016 doubtlessly had to offer. But more important, of course, were the two games we were showcasing this year: Heart of Scrap and Pressure Overdrive. And speaking of diversity, both games offered good reasons for visitors to stop by. Be it thoughtful strategists or action maniacs, our battlestations and arcade couches welcomed many gamers of all ages and origins.
Even though it was not the first time we were showcasing on a tradefair, it is always an unique experience to watch people play what we we’ve been developing over the course of months. The focused looks of being immersed, the smiles and shouts while competing with other players… and of course the valuable and honest feedback we have received. Thinking back to those many great moments still gives us goose bumps. And these experiences, our own booth with those two games, again emphasized for us, what it really means to be indy – to shape our vision the way we feel is right and enjoyable.
So time did fly by, and all of a sudden Gamescom 2016 was over. Five days of not only presenting our own games, but also playing many other, from intense VR titles, over AAA creations to highly individual indie projects. Five days of meeting industry experts, passionate gamers, visiting a few parties and getting a glance of the what Cologne has to offer in terms of tasty food. This year’s Gamescom was probably the most exciting one – and definitely not the last.
Thank you for your hospitality, Cologne. See you next 2017!
