DEEP STATE NEWS - July Patreon Devlog

Greetings, FrogmanDev here.

I've been prioritizing putting up devlogs on the new Patreon but now that enough time has passed I'm going to start reposting those onto Steam - if you want to access those as soon as they drop feel free to become a Patron otherwise they'll end up on here after some time. I also have a public devlog on our Discord that I update on an almost daily basis if you want to check that out.

Patreon Devlog - July 2025

Greetings, FrogmanDev here.

At long last, it’s devlog time. Strap yourself in because this is going to be a long one.

I’ve mentioned this big milestone we’re working on a few times, so let me explain what we’re actually doing. When the new engineer came on board a couple of months ago, we decided to create a fresh Unity project and start the code from scratch with a cleaner, more extensible architecture. Our new engineer is an experienced Unity dev with multiple shipped titles under their belt, and has brought a ton of expertise to the table. This is my first real game project, so while the idea of starting the code over was daunting, it meant a huge step up in terms of game quality in the long term. So we’ve been grinding hard to get the game back to where it was (and beyond) within a tight three-month window. The goal is a polished vertical slice that fixes the issues from the pre-alpha, implements the missing systems, and includes both an improved version of the Afghanistan mission as well as a new level. The plan is to use this new build to pitch to publishers and secure funding. We’re past the halfway mark and making great progress, so let me give you a run down on what I've been working on.

Optimization, Refactoring, Polish

Weapons & Props

So after reviewing my workflow with our engineer we identified some areas that could be improved so I’ve been working my way through all my existing assets and updating them to work better with the new systems we’re implementing. A lot of this is fairly straightforward busywork but it’s also time consuming due to the sheer volume of content already created at this stage.

↑ All gun assets were overhauled to meet new standards. Components like mags and silencers have been optimized to allow for easier swapping, better NPC IK support, and partial pickups (e.g. take just the mag from a dropped gun). This also lays the groundwork for a future attachment system if we decide to implement one. Meshes were cleaned up some more, textures consolidated into a new master atlas, and naming conventions updated across the board.

↑ Like the weapons, all props, items, and doors have been updated to meet our new asset standards. I remade the door animations from scratch, added functioning handles, and replaced several old textures. Alex our composer has also been creating SFX for all prop interactions and weapons, alongside lots of incredible music.

Level Geometry, Textures, & Lighting

↑ One of the most time-consuming tasks has been reworking the level meshes. My previous approach was functional but not optimal. I’ve now split the level meshes into more efficient groups and polished several underdeveloped areas.

↑ Another issue I've been meaning to find a fix has to do with textures. I like to try and keep all environment textures for each mission on a single master texture (atlas), as it means I only have to manage one material instead of dozens or possibly hundreds. The way my atlas was set up before resulted in ugly artifacts at certain viewing angles when texture filtering was enabled, so I did some research. The solution was to add padding around each of the close to 100 textures on the atlas so they would play nice with mip maps. It was a tedious process, but it solved the issue and will be much easier to implement when making new textures moving forward.

↑ I re-baked and repainted all vertex lighting for the Afghanistan level from scratch as I've learned a lot since I made the original and I knew I could bring the quality up a notch. I also added background mountains around most of the map to give the scene more depth.

Steam post imageSteam post image

↑ Updated textures and vertex colors

Steam post image

↑ The original cave area was rather undercooked so I added some more details to make it more interesting. Still needs a little more work but its almost there.

↑ I created a new skybox too, I really wanted to have a set piece/vista at the start of the level that communicates the remote mountainous location of the black site. I carved an opening on the side of the cliff at the start of the level and created a skybox that would look right from that specific vantage point.

The fog issue

I also managed to deal with a long time issue where tall distant objects stood out against the skybox unless the fog color matched the skybox exactly. While looking at random games on noclip.website I noticed something that gave me an idea. I tested a simple white-to-transparent gradient on a plane in Unity, and it worked. The white part takes on the fog color, and the transparent part reveals the skybox beyond. Placing these around the level above the tallest objects hides them in fog regardless of the skybox or fog color. This removes the need to match fog and skybox colors perfectly, which is a big time saver and lets me tweak the fog color on the fly.

↑ Here is what it used to look like with Unity fog and no gradient, you can see the hard line of the 3D mountain models in the distance against the skybox, looks OK but could be better.

↑ Now here it is with the gradient turned on, you can see the 3D mountains disappear and the fog blends into the skybox. Much better imo.

↑ Here is a shot of what the gradient looks like with the fog turned off.

↑ It’s basically a very large, low poly cylinder that runs around the outside of the level with a white to transparent gradient applied.

Light Probes/Dynamic lighting

When we started the new Unity project, we upgraded to the latest version and moved from the Built-in Pipeline to URP. I was using an ancient version of Unity before so I had to spend some time getting used to the new features, adaptive light probes being a big one. Recreating the probes also meant reworking the collision mesh, which I use not just for gameplay but also for baking probes. Preventing light bleed between areas with distinct lighting is tricky, I had to enclose the underground lab in light blocking geometry so that it wouldn't receive lighting from the sky or lights on the surface. For adjacent rooms with distinct lighting I used double walls to create a dark space between them with room for probes, which prevents the light from bleeding from one to the other.

↑ Light probes, working nicely now.

↑ The collision for the lower prison lab area is made up of over 700 manually placed primitives, mostly simple box colliders. It was a pretty tedious process but the lighting looks great now that everything's dialed in and the in-game collision is very performant.

Tangent for fellow devs: I discovered that you can force light probes to use per-vertex shading, which I’m very excited about as that’s something I thought we’d have to create a custom solution for. If you weren’t aware, you can find the setting hidden in your Unity pipeline asset settings, this is the one here ↑

↑ If you navigate to the Lighting section, click on the 3 small dots in the top right and enable Advanced Settings, this will expose the Spherical Harmonics Evaluation Mode. Change that to Per Vertex and poof you’re done.

I stumbled on this by accident, hopefully someone finds it as exciting as I do. Also I’ve only tested this while using URP, so I'm not sure if it works for other pipelines.

New Tutorial Area

↑ A comment I saw a lot from players from the pre-alpha was the noticeable lack of tutorial, with some people missing out entirely on specific mechanics because they couldn't figure out how they worked. I've extended the beginning of the level to include an intro area that will teach the player a few things as they progress into the main mission area.

↑ Part of the new tutorial path.

New Assets

↑ I finally got around to making dedicated container assets to hold optional secret weapons, something visually consistent across levels that players can instantly recognize and get excited about. Instead of placing secret weapons out in the open, these containers add an additional layer of anticipation, since they need to be opened to reveal what’s inside.

↑ The “Wingman” (Mk27) was one of the last untouched weapons from the pre-alpha. I kept the original model as a base but managed to cut the tri count from 795 to 463 while actually increasing the overall level of detail. It originally used three textures for reasons I can’t explain, probably because it was one of the first guns I ever modeled, but I created a new texture from scratch that looks much better. After two years of daily practice my skills have improved a lot. This is great, the only problem being I am always fighting the urge to go back and redo old work. Luckily most assets are now updated and finally hitting a consistent quality I’m happy with.

↑ This guy wasn’t directly tied to our current milestone, but I wanted to exercise my monster design chops as it had been a few months since my last one. During one of our brainstorming sessions we tossed around ideas for a tense encounter featuring a unique enemy type that would appear later in the game. I wanted something tall and heavy, something whose footsteps alone would sound threatening, as well as an expressionless and unnerving face.

↑ For the face I took inspiration from pictures of flatworms and stingrays, both creatures I find have an unsettling and alien look about them.

↑ My first pass looked much different. I tried playing with teeth, which looked cool but didn’t lend themselves to the cosmic/otherworldly vibe I wanted.

↑ The creature also started out bulkier, but I opted to slim it down a bit.

↑ Slimmed down, dead guard for scale.

↑ To push the otherworldly feel, I repurposed a vertex color water caustics shader I’d been working on and tweaked it a bit to see what kind of trippy visuals I could achieve. I isolated the effect to the rim around the eye using a vertex color mask, added a scrolling gradient texture to displace vertices for an undulating motion which doubles as a mask for a starry nebula texture. I’m still exploring how it can tie into gameplay, maybe an alertness cue, psychic attack, or cloaking effect, but visually I think it’s coming together nicely.

Loading Screens

↑ Another thing we started on recently was roughing out how the loading screens between missions will be handled. We are thinking of a tactical satellite map of the earth with a multilevel zoom into the mission area. Have a few windows that pop up with intel on the various mission objectives, the individuals and factions involved etc. Alex our producer/composer happens to be a graphic designer as well so he made a quick prototype that’s already looking very nice.

↑ I took a top down screenshot of the Afghanistan level in blender and then blended it into a satellite photo from google earth. This hasn't been implemented yet but it'll likely have some scanlines overlaid and a blue-ish monitor tint to match the gif above.

What I'm working on right now

↑ Most recently I've been focused on optimizing my old player rig. It had a lot of issues that I had been putting off addressing but starting a fresh Unity project was the excuse to finally do it. Rigging and animating hurts my brain even when things are set up properly, but fixing scale and rotation issues on a rig that's fully animated, with numerous ik constraints and children, without breaking the animations, or rig, or both... is honestly a nightmare. Luckily I figured it all out, and I made sure to thoroughly document the steps so if I need to do this again in the future it should be much easier.

↑ Alongside the player rig, I’ve been working on new NPC animations. The rig is in good shape, but the old demo animations were rushed out and needed redoing.

I’m focusing on cleaner walk/run cycles, proper idle animations (stretching, yawning, swatting at flies etc), startle responses to spotting the player, inspecting bodies, taking cover, and calling for backup. These should help NPCs feel dynamic and help telegraph their state to the player more clearly, especially when combined with audio cues, which was a major hole in the pre-alpha. Definitely the most challenging task on my current to do list.

Thanks so much again for all your support, it's been a huge help. And sorry for the lack of content the last while, just been totally swamped trying to meet this deadline. It'll all be worth it though, super stoked to be able to showcase the new systems we've been working on.

Cheers,

FrogmanDev

End of July Patreon Devlog