Giant commentator heads! - Dev log

Today we're talking to our artist Isaac about how the Commentators have been adapted to work with the new King of the Hill team battle mode!

What are you working on right now?

Recently I’ve been working on the King of the Hill update. I’m focusing on some holograms of Commentatron and Analysis-Bot, the visual effects, and how those will affect gameplay in that mode. I’m making key art, which we will reveal on the store page when the update launches!

I’ve also helped playtest the new mode. The times we’ve played as a team have been the most fun I’ve had in Danger Zone. I was wondering why we didn’t have this mode before!

What new visual effects have you added?

We have a few things in the capture area. There are some hologram walls around the capture area that tell you who’s in control of the area. There are funny new holographic heads of Analysis-Bot and Commentatron. They need to be seen from every angle in the world and tell you what’s happening. Some of the first versions we experimented with looked like a jail, because there were multiple bars around it and it felt like you were in a cage! So we kept iterating until we had what you see now.

There’s also a bar on the top of the screen that we didn’t have before. It’s pretty interesting because even if it sounds like a small detail, it’s really important for this mode. We need to communicate how the team’s doing, who’s winning, and it needs to be clear. The challenge is to maintain the game’s fun without being distracting. That means when you glance at it, the UI should make you excited that you’re winning or eager to fight if you’re losing!

The Hologram heads are really important to the new game mode. How did you make them?

The objective was to create a visible place to draw everyone to fight. The holographic commentator heads tell you who’s winning and are an easy-to-see landmark.

For the animations, we wanted to try some laughing, angry, and chaotic faces. Robots aren’t expressive, and in Clone Drone, they don’t have a lot of ways to show emotion. Both of the robots have different mouths and we only really animate those while they’re moving, so we broke their original rig for these new ones. We move the head in ways that you’ll never see otherwise, because it would break their necks! Wherever the neck moves, the head will follow, because they’re one solid piece. So we took that away. It gave me a lot more freedom for animation. I made the heads dance around a lot to show those emotions, because they should be funny when you see them.

The process of making them look holographic was a little tricky. We wanted to have the old-school scan line effect that makes them look like they’re being displayed on a monitor. It was challenging, because we have an older version of the Unity render pipeline to make those. It’s easier to recreate in more modern pipelines, but we used procedural textures to add the lines and it works for all the objects in the world.

Normally we see the pair together, as if they’re behind their desk. Now is the time to see them shine alone! They’ve always been in the game, but this feels new because both of them were re-rigged to work more like the normal Clone Drone characters. There is still work to do on them. They still turn