This week was absolutely mad: as mentioned plenty of times by now, we won a Unity award past Tuesday, and we are still over the moon. We are so humbled to be mentioned on the same page as some our favorite games like Firewatch, Inside and Valve's the lab, and it's quite unreal (although really it's Unity). And a huge shoutout to our competitors, who all have shown amazing games with such a great level of polish!
Because we had to watch the stream online at 4am due to a lack of funding, Wednesday and the rest of the days were a bit messy. We were tired, triumphant and ecstatic - but there was also room for some work.
There was plenty of design and experimental work in a lot of areas, but one important part in particular got a lot of good attention: we are building our own terrain system for Pine to make the full island walkable and streamable. We're loading in a few island tests to see how it runs, like this one:
It's highly optimized and tailored for Pine. We are putting a lot of effort in LODing and streaming. We let Unity cut up the heightmap and terrain into a lot of different chunks, and in realtime we load the parts that are necessary.
It's a difficult process and we're still working on it, but part of this is stitching terrains with different resolutions together:
On the art department, a lot of work went into experimenting with this terrain (workflow-wise). We are also working on some new important animations which we will share soon, and a new species got a few passes to test ingame (trying out different colors):
Lastly, we are trying out some new scenery and 'scene concepts', as we call them - this week with some new Alpafant behavior and nightly mood tests:
Hue silently avoids the Alpafants, but meets the Litters in this post-Unite video... so very proudly #madewithunity! #pine #gamedev pic.twitter.com/RNSzOWBTnN
— Twirlbound (@Twirlbound) November 4, 2016
That's it for this week, stay tuned for more next week when we have all gotten a bit more sleep!
Until next time!
