Progress Update

Hi everyone, I wanted to give an update on how things are with development.

In our last post, we’ve mentioned that we're going to take a step back to see where we should take development further in order to bring value and improve player experience. Based on your feedback and upon tinkering with the game further we’ve decided to focus our efforts on the core gameplay loop and workflow as these are possibly the two most important components in terms of the game being a product and a project. We’ve managed to overcome some challenges and made several improvements to the game and we’re excited to show them to you in this post! So lets get started.

Combat and Locomotion

With Dinosaurs Dominion being a simple and compact game, Combat and Locomotion is by far the most important component for us to get right. Because of this we’ve spent the majority of our time testing, refining, and thinking of ways to further enhance the current combat and locomotion system. So far we’ve managed to implement several improvements to our combat system which not only fixed several bugs but also introduced new mechanics that betters player - AI interaction. Here’s a video showcasing elements we’ve fixed and improved:

The first is attack - hitbox reaction. After a few tests and tinkers we’ve managed to create a solution that both fix and improve combat detection for both player and AI characters, allowing for more accurate hit detection.

The next is character slope orientation. This allows both players and AI dinosaurs to rotate / orient based on the angle of the surface they're currently on, which makes for better visuals and feel when traversing steep areas. With the combat system improved, integrating the slope orientation system becomes possible as it allows us to have accurate attacks and reactions even on steep surfaces.

The last is additional combat improvements. This is where we focus our attention in finding ways to further improve the interaction between players and AIs during combat. One of the ways we found to further improve this is by having an evasion system for the AI which allows the AI to escape when the player is too close. The subject of Combat improvements is still very much on going as its tied to many other elements including level design and animation which we haven't delved too much into at the moment and will be our main focus moving forward.

Lighting and Workflow

The goal of Dinosaurs Dominion has always been to create compact experience that’s both enjoyable and immersive for players. One of the key ways we can improve from a visual / immersion standpoint is to improve the lighting and post processing.

Currently much of the visual fidelity of DD is heavily influenced by its post processing. This has resulted in several challenges especially regarding texture consistency. Before the model is brought into Unity it has to go through several programs, in our case we use ZBrush Core for modeling, Topogun 3 for retopology, Blender for UV unwrap, rigging, and animation, and Substance Painter for texture painting (and occasionally baking).

In other words, by heavily relying on post processing, the visuals of our models look very different in these programs (Substance Painter) than to how they look in Unity. We are fully aware that some differences are inevitable as these programs may have different systems to how they compute lighting and shaders, however, being able to mitigate this will greatly help streamline development as we’d have more consistency.

Because of this we’ve decided to move away post processing based workflow to lighting based workflow, what this means is that the lights and lighting system in Unity will do much of the heavy lifting for the visuals / theme while post processing will be used only to enhance the visuals. This has allowed us to not only have better consistency between our programs but create a much more natural looking atmosphere.

Development

The update to our lighting system resulted in us having better texture consistency between programs. Having this consistency has enabled us to create models more efficiently (less back and forth). As a result we feel more confident growing the list of creatures for the game.

These models are still heavily work in progress and will be worked on further as development progresses.

We are still in the early stages of our RnD and there’s still a bunch more we need to cover. We’re excited as to where this will take us and we look forward to letting you all know when we’ve made more progress and improvements for the game.

That’s currently it for this devlog and more updates coming soon!