Intro

Artwork credit goes to OpenClipart-Vectors

Welcome back to our blog where we recount VG2’s game development journey. These last few weeks my brother and I have talked more about what we want the game to be. We had briefly went over the genre of the game in our first Blog post, we had discussed we wanted it to be some variant of a horror game. Alas we have pinned down the core concept and what we would like the game to be. Moving on from core concept we began to touch on other aspects such as, the level of quality we expect, art development work flows, and possible features the game would benefit from. One last topic for this months blog is our decision to develop more content outside of just game development; as this is a game development blog I won’t go into to many details about it. Now with the expectations of this months blog laid out let us get into the meat and potatoes of our before mentioned topics.

Game concept

As mentioned above we talked more on our games core concept to give us a better direction of what we need to be developing. This stage of development is always exciting because generally everyone lets loose and throws back whatever exciting idea they have. These ideas are almost always easier said then done. My brother and I have listened to many game development stories and this is a struggle for most game developers from indie to AAA. The ideas were flowing but one of us was always weary of scope creep, due to this, I believe we were able to land on a perfect concept for our first project. What seemed to come up often was having our game be online multiplayer, I know I know, I just said we were cautions about scope creep and here we are adding on a huge task that we hadn’t planned on doing. Even with our caution we believed it was a core feature we needed to include in our game. Reasoning behind this decision is we want to create a game where friends/families can come together and just have a fun night laughing, and joking around. This idea just didn’t seem possible without some form of cooperative play. It was set in stone VG2 would be making a multiplayer game. Now with cooperative fun in mind it led us to our next question. How would we foster this fun environment while maintaining a horror based game? Under the moonlit glare of our windows we imagined what got us feeling most excited and nostalgic, this was something my brother and I have always enjoyed….camping. Camping with friends and family has always been exhilarating, so why couldn’t it be in a game. Bringing friends together across the world to have an experience they otherwise might not easily have had was a opportunity we couldn’t pass up. Tie this together with a horror based game and we got a camping trip gone wrong, it would allow us to create those fond memories of camping while still throwing in the occasional scare that may make for a funny moment. We loved this idea and we ran with it. What a sigh of relief to find such an amazing concept that got us more motivated then ever to bring our creation to life. One thing still remained a NAME; if something comes to mind please let us know.

Render pipeline

Screenshot of Unity showcasing HDRP reference Unity

Now with a better idea of what we needed to construct we looked at what we currently had developed; largely just an environment. What my brother and I looked at was a decent map but it wasn’t as great as it could be. This was largely due to our decision to use Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline so, we made a call. The switch was decided right then and there to switch to Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). The tools available with the updated rendering system would allow us to achieve a level of quality VG2 wants to represent. A quality where it would lend itself to player immersion, to get them pulled into the game and hopefully develop fond memories with their friends. Now making this decision seemed rash the pros easily outweighed the cons though. The cons being it would make releasing the game harder on platforms with limited hardware, mainly the Nintendo Switch but we felt it needed to be done. My brother and I want to represent a level of quality in our games that we could be proud of, something we strive for in all our endeavors.

Note* We are hopeful the new hardware in Nintendo Switch 2 might be enough to allow for a game developed in unity’s HDR pipeline to be played on a Nintendo platform.

Character modeling

GIF made with Ezgif by VG2. The GIF was limited to 10.. The black flickering is quite distracting.

Aww character art assets, I am sure we can’t be the only game developers to struggle with this. Getting the human shape to an acceptable level may be one of the hardest things to capture in art. Especially when you factor in that most people know what a anatomically correct person looks like subconsciously, so if one little thing is off people will see it and be put off by it. Alas we were able to develop a workflow that produced a human model adequately but one massive roadblock I ran into is the HAIR. Oh my! I could NOT, for the life of me, find a reliable method for getting hair cards out of blender and looking great in unity. I then decided to go another route alembic produced hair. Now this method did prove to work, for the most part with some fenagling I was able to get it looking good and ready for shaders. This is when all hell broke loose; the moment I began working with shaders it became evident that the resources needed to produce this hair was far to high. Or so I thought, with just one hair system Unity began to render black flickering. I told my brother I would resolve our hair issues and so, I scoured the internet for days trying to find a solution to the tangled mess of a hair system, when all hope was lost and when I felt I had failed…I had solved it. For some reason that I don’t fully understand yet, is when selecting a shader graph to use the HDRP hair shader graph is not the correct one. At least in this project HDRP hair shader graph is to not be used; with a simple click to HDRP Lit the black flickering was demolished. I still worry about how efficient it is; worrying that it might be to resource intensive, I will keep learning the technology. For now we will settle for naked mole rat people. If anyone has a creative solution for hair I am all ears, and no hair.

Reviews

Artwork by Digital Sun games edited by VG2

Alright last but not least a brief overview of what the heck I am talking about when I say developing a different kind of content. What I refer to is content still revolving around games, not of development but of game reviews. One of our goals for VG2 was to bring a community together to not just discuss our games but to discuss all very good video games. Game reviewing content is a powerful way to get that conversation started. My brother and I have produced several first impression videos already, with time our editing skills and reviewing process will become more refined. The goal is 1 video a week at the very least. All this content can be found here on our website or at our youtube channel.

Conclusion

That does it for this month, I hope my summarization was insightful for you to read. The game has come along quite nicely and with a more focused concept I only have hope that our game development journey remains a rewarding endeavor. I wish to hear your thoughts on a exciting game title or maybe a crash course in hair development on our social accounts below. With that I’d like to leave us with a motivational quote for our readers and myself to draw inspiration from:

““Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.””

— Henry Ford

Blog # 3 Game Concept, a Hairy Mess, and Reviews