Lacuna Passage - Devlog #25 - GDC Mega Update

Regretfully, it has been almost two months since our last official update. Well today I am remedying that with a really exciting post about my upcoming trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (actually I'm writing this from the airport on my way there). The team can’t wait to show our work to all the conference attendees, but I wanted to share with you first all the work we have done to prepare for this trip.

We have created a demo that we are calling Lacuna Passage Prologue which will serve as a sneak peek of what players will expect to see in the final game. It has story elements that tie into where the game will start, but the gameplay is more of a linear tutorial to introduce important concepts in a short time span for demonstration purposes. This Prologue content may or may not be incorporated into the final game. It depends a lot on the feedback we receive while at GDC and if we think it is valuable to the experience we want to create. Since a lot may change in the coming months we are not planning to distribute this content to backers prior to release, but we have created a video play through for you all to watch and added a bunch of new screenshots.

Lacuna Passage is an exploration and survival game set on Mars. This game is still in development. The content seen in this video was created specifically for demonstration at GDC 2014. For more information visit our website www.randomseedgames.com

We would love to hear what you think of the direction we are taking. If anyone is interested we might do a more in-depth run down of how we built this demo in a future devlog. This is a great opportunity for us to get even more people excited about Lacuna Passage who may never have heard of us before. Feel free to share the video or screenshots with your friends and family.

If anyone will be attending GDC and would like to play a live demonstration of the Prologue content you can email me at <contact [at] randomseedgames.com>. I will also be wearing bright red Lacuna Passage tshirts all week, so if you see me just flag me down!

Wish us luck!
Tyler Owen
Project Lead

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #24 - Steam Dev Days Take-Aways

We have returned from Steam Dev Days and boy did we learn a lot. We met some great people, attended some insightful sessions, and we have a new perspective on the remaining development for Lacuna Passage.

So, what did we take away from the experience? (Besides the amazing complimentary breakfasts and free Steam Machines...) More than anything else, we came away with a sense of reassurance. A sense that we are going in the right direction and that many of our fears are mostly unfounded. Here are some of the key points that we gained from attending Steam Dev Days:

1. Integrating Steamworks features like cloud saving, Steam trading cards, and more, should not be an issue.
   • This is something we already assumed, but as with many other things related to development, we wanted to make sure we talked to others who had experience with these features to give us reassurance.
   • We are going to focus on the basics first, and then we will look to our Kickstarter backers and other supporters to find out what features they value most and work on integrating those as well.
2. Polishing our VR integration will be very important as we look ahead to better VR technologies and consumer adoption of those technologies.
   • It's no surprise that VR was a huge focus for the entire conference. Valve is extensively supporting VR and we want to be there when it hits critical mass.
   • Some of the specifics that were shared about making optimal VR experiences are causing us to think back on some of our design decisions and perhaps make some critical changes that will ensure an enjoyable experience with Lacuna Passage.
3. Though it may feel like a free-for-all right now, Steam Greenlight has proved very successful for those developers who have managed to get through approval and sell their games via Steam.
   • This one might sound a bit obvious (get on Steam and you will sell games, duh), but since we are investing in Lacuna Passage as a product and the beginning of a business, we were looking for reassurances of success.
   • We have modest estimates for sales numbers that we feel would be necessary to fund development of another title in the future (obviously that is a ways off yet) and everyone we talked to seemed to think that our sales estimates were very conservative.
   • Gabe Newell made comments during the conference that he would like to see Steam Greenlight disappear and to open the flood gates to all developers to publish on Steam. We hope that this will enable more developers to make money doing what they love, but there is always the possibility that it may dilute the marketplace. If we are unable to launch Lacuna Passage prior to the demise of Greenlight then we may miss out on the higher exposure that Greenlight has given us.  Ultimately, we trust that Valve has plans to make sure that this does not happen. We think that giving more developers access to the Steam store will have a positive effect overall.
   • We are interested in reaching out to more Greenlight developers to gather sales data and any other information they are willing to share. If you are a developer willing to be a part of this please contact us at <contact [at] randomseedgames.com>.
4. Enabling our fans to contribute to development can be a positive for both us and them.
   • We have already made extensive use of volunteer contributors for the development of Lacuna Passage (not to mention the financial contributions of our Kickstarter backers), but Valve's experiments with user generated content (DOTA 2, TF2, Steam Workshop, etc) has inspired us to expand our current efforts.
   • Right now we are not planning for mod support or Steam Workshop support. We just don't think it's feasible for the scale of game we are creating; however, we are willing to work with almost anyone who can demonstrate a certain skill level with content creation.
   • For example, almost all of our artists are volunteers. We just haven't heavily advertised this fact. Well, now we are. If you are interested in contributing content - not just additional content, but content that will be part of the primary experience of Lacuna Passage - please contact us at <contact [at] randomseedgames.com>. Right now we are most interested in 3D artists and texture artists, but later in development we will have need of voice actors, graphic designers, and many others. If you really want to help make Lacuna Passage the best game it can be then we want to enable you to do so.

Steam Dev Days was an incredible experience and we can't wait to take what we've learned and apply it in the months to come. Right now our next planned conference stop will be GDC where we will hopefully have a playable portion of the game. If anyone else is planning on attending, please let us know and we would love to meet up with you!

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #23 - Steam Dev Days and The Months Ahead

Hi there! My name is Tyler Owen and I'm the lead developer for Lacuna Passage. I normally write these posts anyway, but I wanted to make this one a little more personal while discussing some of our plans for the coming weeks and months ahead of us.

Steam Dev Days

This Wednesday and Thursday I will be attending the first Steam Dev Days event in Seattle with my father Jeff Owen (who has been kindly assisting with many of the financial and business-related elements of Random Seed Games). The conference is an invite-only event for approved Steam partners, which, thanks to the support of our followers on Steam Greenlight, we are.

Our goals in attending the event are threefold. 1) To learn more about the specifics of Steam publishing and SDK integration, 2) To explore the future possibilities related to VR and Steam Machines, and 3) To meet up with other indie developers.

This will be our first real conference visit since starting development of Lacuna Passage. Unfortunately we will not have a proper demo along with us, but it seems that will not be the focus of the conference anyways. The announced sessions and the fact that this is invite only for developers indicate that this conference will not be about promoting or demoing games. It will be about learning the Steam infrastructure directly from Valve and networking with other developers to learn from their experiences. That's what we intend to do. Our acceptance onto Steam through the Greenlight process might arguably be more important to the future of our company than even the funding support we received via Kickstarter so we don't want to waste this opportunity.

If any other developers are interested in talking shop while at the conference, please get in touch with us via email or twitter and we can figure out a time to meet up.

The Months Ahead

It is becoming apparent that we may not be able to provide as many behind-the-scenes details over the coming months as we have since the Kickstarter. This is due to many factors, but most importantly, we don't want to spoil things for our players. Since so much of Lacuna Passage revolves around the story we want to tell, we need to be careful that those story details are not revealed too early. We want many of our art assets and locations in the game to be a genuine surprise. What that means is that as we continue development there may be periods of time where we are unable to share what we are working on. A lack of updates will NOT mean a lack of progress. We will try to continue discussing our work as best as we can, but our visual updates may be fewer and farther between. We hope you all understand.

With that being said, we do have just a small visual preview of a large asset from our lead artist Cameron. Above is the nearly finished high poly render of the mobile drilling rig.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #22 - Survival Assets Preview

We are making continued progress with art development for Lacuna Passage and this week we would like to share a few new assets related to the survival elements of the game. Every food and water packet you will find in the game is fully rendered and detailed. Your inventory is not just a text list in a menu. You will have control over a very visual inventory consisting of dozens of unique assets. Check out some of the assets we have created so far below.

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We are still adding even more items (including canned and boxed foods), but we are very happy with the look of the transparent and foil packets. On the technical side, most packets range between 200 and 400 polygons with a few of the more complex ones up near 1000.

When you are alone on Mars will you save your vacuum sealed dessert packs for last?

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #21 - Soundtrack Preview #4

Every once and a while we like to share a bit of the soundtrack as it builds and evolves over time. If you watched our video devlog from last week you might recognize the piece from the loops we used to demonstrate the dynamic soundtrack features of the game. They were originally meant just as test loops while we worked on the system side, but I liked them so much that they may find their way into the finished game. Here they are in their entirety. 

Once again, the music credit goes to the talented Clark Aboud. Here's a playlist of all the tracks we've shared so far.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #19 - The Power of Unity Plugins Round 2

Back in April we posted about some of the Unity plugins that we are using to create Lacuna Passage. Since then we have started using even more plugins that have further eased our development workflow. Here are some of our favorites.

Terrain Composer - By Nathaniel Doldersum

I wish we had access to this tool from the start. Terrain Composer allows you to do some pretty incredible things to generate and tweak your terrain directly in Unity without the help of external tools. We still utilize a few external tools like World Machine, but Terrain Composer helps in handling some of the more repetitive menial tasks. This is an extremely powerful tool for those who take the time to learn it.

ats Colormap ULTRA Terrain Shader - By forst

We talked about our terrain shader in our previous showcase, but this is much more than just a shader now. The updates made here have drastically improved our terrain creation workflow, especially now that it is fully compatible with Unity 4.X. The new editor interface for setting up your terrain is super intuitive and automates many of the steps that were originally mostly manual. In my honest opinion Unity needs to make these kinds of terrain tools the default. When combined with Terrain Composer you have everything you need to make the most believable worlds possible in Unity.

Highlighting System - By Deep Dream Games

We are using the Highlighting System to help the player identify some objectives and highlight key objects in the environment. The effects are fairly uniform, but you can change colors and overlay/blending methods to suit your needs. There are plenty of provided example scripts to get you started with whatever highlighting functionality you might need.

Mega-Fiers - By Chris West

Mega-Fiers… What can I say about Mega-Fiers that you haven’t heard already (seriously, they do an awesome job marketing and demonstrating this plugin). Well, in case you don’t know, Mega-Fiers is an extremely powerful mesh deformation plugin. If you need a mesh to bend, twist, wave, squish, or anything else, then look no further. I first used Mega-Fiers when working on TIMEframe to create the slow-motion blowing banners in the city. I was able to animate the banners in 3ds Max using physics simulations and export the vertex animation data for use in Unity. The result is a smooth, incredibly detailed cloth-like animation that would not have been possible with the Unity cloth animation tools. We are excited about the possibilities for Mega-Fiers in Lacuna Passage.

NGUI - By Tasharen Entertainment

There is a reason that NGUI has become almost the default for creating user interfaces in Unity. It is undeniably better suited for the task than the built-in Unity GUI tools. We recently began work on converting the datapad GUI over to NGUI and we are very happy with the results. Fewer draw calls, manageable layer depths, texture atlasing, and more. I can’t imagine using anything else. Once you try NGUI you don’t go back.

Shader Forge Alpha - By Acegikmo

In our last plugin showcase we mentioned some great hard surface shaders; however, since that time we have made the plunge into creating shaders of our own. I had used the node-based Strumpy Shader Editor for a few years, but that plugin seems to be defunct now and not supported correctly in Unity 4.X. Luckily Shader Forge appears to have picked up the mantle. They are still in Alpha, but we have been testing the Alpha version to create new shaders for Lacuna Passage and we are blown away with the results. Plugins like Shader Forge go a long way in closing the visual gap between engines like Unreal and Unity. Keep an eye on this one and snatch it up the minute it hits the asset store.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #18 - More Concept Art, a New Shader, and Terrain

While we toil away on development of Lacuna Passage we thought we might give you a peek at some more concept art. We have really hit our stride with our art style, due in large part to our concept artist, Brandon Kern. Check out some of his work below.

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As we worked on bringing these concepts to life in 3D we realized that our equipment shader just wasn't up to the task. The normal maps were not as pronounced as we would have liked, and it was difficult to define strongly contrasting materials. Our models looked somewhat desaturated and ubiquitous across what should have been different surfaces. We set about creating a shader that would give us greater control over contrast and material definition (things like fresnel lighting, reflectivity, edge highlighting, and specularity). Below you can see the result of our efforts. It is now much easier to see the difference between surfaces like shiny plastic, dull metal, and rough rubber. This improved shader is still in testing since it was created using an alpha version of the upcoming Unity add-on "Shader Forge", but we are excited with the results and hope to utilize the eventual commercial release of Shader Forge.

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We've also been hard at work detailing the full-scale terrain that will be featured in the final game. Proper textures will be applied much later, but the massive heightmap is coming together quite nicely and should present the player with a wide variety of real Mars geographic features to explore. Check out a little preview below.

Time-lapse of the (still unfinished) terrain

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Untextured 3D preview of terrain in its current state

Find out more about how we are creating our terrain in our previous devlog.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #16 - From The Forums #1

 This week we are starting a new intermittent devlog feature called "From The Forums" where we will highlight some of our favorite questions posed by fans on our official forums. Check out some of our answers from the previous month.

1. Forum user mcchic45 asked if there will be actual previous or future/planned Mars mission equipment to discover.

Tyler Owen: This is definitely something that we have considered, however, there are two sides to the blade of realism. Mars is very large and our previous rovers are spread out over vast distances on it's surface. If we want to be pedantically realistic then it would be impossible for us to reach those other man-made structures from the region where Lacuna Passage takes place (namely Holden Crater). We will see how we might be able to find a balance here since so many people have expressed a similar desire.

2. Forum user JosephineC asked about system requirements.

Owen: It is still very early, but generally we would like to have the game run well on low settings on a 2012 MacBook Pro. That is the Mac we have for testing so that is our goal. I think if you have a desktop that is less than 5 years old you should be okay, but even older might be reasonable. We really want the game to scale for many different machines.

I don't want to really quote any real system specs and get caught with my foot in my mouth later (but hopefully in the near future we will have more details).

3. Forum user orpheus asked if anyone from Random Seed Games will be attending any gaming shows in the future.

Owen: The first show that we are planning to attend is GDC 2014, but we may hit a few more if the budget and scheduling allows for it (potentially PAX East).

4. Forum user orpheus asked if the game will be exclusively first-person and if you will be able to see your body.

Owen: Our goal is to never cut away from the first-person perspective. I look to games like Half Life for their ability to tell a story entirely through a first-person perspective.

As far as body awareness goes, it will be difficult for us to achieve an animated body with the limited resources we have.

5. Forum user masookerguy asked about the dynamic elements of the game play (weather, survival resources, etc).

Owen: Since the story of the game is almost completely non-linear we have quite a bit of freedom to have lots of randomly generated events and little details. It's more about what we have time for than anything. We would like to make lots of elements unpredictable so that everyone will have different survival experiences and so that the game is more replayable.

6. Forum user orpheus asked how saving will work.

Owen: We are still experimenting with a save method that we think will fit the gameplay best. Our intent right now is to save the game every time you "sleep". This adds a bit of danger to exploration in that you could lose your progress if you don't keep track of your resources. This could change though. It depends on what feels best for gameplay.

7. Forum user synchromesh asked if habitats and stations will be exploreable and if vehicles will be driveable.

Owen: Almost all of the habitats and capsules will be exploreable. We have not confirmed any usable vehicles however. There are some limitations for us to consider.

8. Forum user ItchyVagoo asked what survival elements we are focused on.

Owen: Here are the survival elements that we are currently working with:

• Starvation

• Dehydration

• Exhaustion

• Stamina

• Oxygen levels

• Battery levels

And here are a few things we are considering or currently testing:

• Body temperature

• Injuries

• Illness

9. Forum user orpheus asked if we will be including controller support.

Owen: This is something we plan to support 100%. I also play many PC games with a 360 pad so that's how I plan on playing LP myself.

10. Forum user orpheus asked if Lacuna Passage will contain any mature themes or content.

Owen: That is a very good question. I would personally like to have some of our characters react in ways that I find more realistic (swearing, discussing mature themes, etc), but we may decide to offer a "clean" version as well.

Most of these astronauts would probably be very professional in their conduct, but if you had all communication cut off from Earth with no way to return I think almost anyone would slip a little. We aren't looking to include mature content for shock value. We just want to avoid the "censored for TV" effect, where it's more noticeable when someone reacts inappropriately because they *avoid* swearing/etc.

11. Forum user orpheus asked if Jessica Rainer’s character development will be a primary element of the plot.

Owen: Jessica's character development is a huge part of your journey on Mars. We are going to be focusing a lot of time and attention on her motivations for becoming an astronaut as well as what keeps her going when it seems like all hope is lost.

12. Forum user orpheus (this person is seriously hungry for info about Lacuna Passage) asked what might be included in the Kickstarter Exclusive Bonus Content.

Owen: We haven't finalized anything for the Kickstarter bonus content ($25 level), but here are some ideas we are working with:

• Blueprints for some of the habitats

• Playlist of Jessica's favorite music

• A mini-game playable on the datapad

• A book/short story/poetry that Jessica brought with her

• High-resolution maps of the mission area

• 3D-model viewer of mission equipment and previous Mars rovers

• Unique in-game HUD colors/reskins

This is NOT a list of what we have planned, just ideas. From that list though I hope you can see that we are trying to stay away from anything that could be consider direct "story" content relevant to Jessica's journey. We still have a year and a half to sort it out and get feedback/suggestions/think of more stuff. There is a thread in the Backers Only board where you can give suggestions and feedback for the exclusive Bonus Content.

13. Forum user synchromesh asked if we are considering releasing a walk-around demo any time soon.

Owen: I would like to at some point in the near future, but we want to pin down a few performance issues so that we put our best foot forward. I'm open to a simple walk-around demonstration though. Any bit of time we spend on extras takes away from development on the final game however. We will try to balance requests with requirements.

We love all the discussion that has been going on in our forums and we thank you all for your great questions. If you want your question to be a part of our next "From The Forums" feature then get on over to the forums now!