Lacuna Passage - Devlog #31 - The Midwest Game Developers Summit

Last week we posted (mistakenly only in a Kickstarter update) about taking a trip to Oconomowoc, Wisconsin (yes, that's a place) for the Midwest Game Developers Summit (yes, that's a thing).

We decided to bring along our improved Prologue demo that we created for GDC and show it publicly for the first time in the MGDS expo hall. And the response that we got from players was awesome.

The recently added controller support came in very handy and the game felt great played on a big screen with a controller in your hands.

Our players walked away with some cool stickers and we took their names and emails so that we could send all the photos they took in the game to them later. We were blown away by some of the pictures they took and collected our favorites in an album (click below to enlarge or view on Imgur).

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I also gave a talk at the conference entitled "AAA" Indie: Big Games with Small Teams and Tiny Budgets. If you are interested in seeing some behind the scenes development details about Lacuna Passage you can check out a video recording of the talk below, but the audio is not great so make sure you enable captions to help you follow along.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #30 - The Power of Unity Plugins Round 3

We are making this a semi-regular segment as we continue to use all the great tools available on the Unity Asset Store to complete Lacuna Passage. Check our previous posts for more plugin recommendations:

Round 1 and Round 2

Physics To Animation Tool - by Drunken Lizard Games

We actually experimented with using this for the rebuild of TimeFrame that we are putting together in our free time, but now we are considering using it in Lacuna Passage as well. It's a great way to "capture" a physics event and replay it exactly the same every time. In the past we have had to use complicated animation exports from 3ds Max or just let our physics events react differently every time with Unity's physic simulations. Not only is this a simpler process, it also greatly improves your game's performance since it doesn't require physics calculations.

Mega Scatter - by Chris West

I have been using this plugin in tons of great places. Most notably, for mass-placing rocks around our Mars terrain. This is another very polished plugin from the makers of MegaFiers, the Unity mesh deformation system. The scattering options are extremely customizable and their user support is excellent. The only downside we have found is that large scenes start to present scattering issues including slow down, but this system is perfect for scattering objects around medium and small scenes.

Shader Forge Beta - by Joachim Holmér

We already mentioned this one in a previous post back when it was still in Alpha, but now it is in Beta and available on the Asset Store officially. I can't say enough good things about Shader Forge. The developer is extremely active in improving this visual shader editor and we use it for all the shaders in all of our projects now. This isn't just a tool, it's an investment in the quality of your game's art. If you come up with an awesome shader you could even put it up on the Asset Store yourself!

VPaint: Advanced Vertex Painting - by Valkyrie Entertainment

This plugin is super useful when combined with Shader Forge. We are working on some shaders that utilize vertex colors for texture blending and with this vertex painting tool we can experiment with these blend settings without having to swap back and forth between Unity and our 3D modeling applications. As usual, some of the best plugins are the ones that save you time and VPaint is no exception. 

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #29 - Habitat Interior Designs

Since we posted our last few videos we have made even more progress with the time-of-day systems by adding in clouds and stars which you can see below.

Exaggerated clouds to demonstrate the rim-lighting effect as the sun passes behind the clouds

Subtle, wispy clouds like you would find on Mars

With these systems mostly complete I have now moved on to improve our scripts for controlling inventory and context sensitive object interaction. One of the first steps in doing this has been to make a “tag” system. This will allow us to display information about any object just by looking at them. Below you can see these new tags in their early form.

I’m also very happy to officially announce that we now have a new full-time team member! My brother Spencer (who can be seen in the original Kickstarter pitch video) has joined us as a full-time artist and general assistant for the project.

Spencer and Jeremy (another part-time project volunteer) have been focused these last few weeks on developing the designs for the main habitat, otherwise known as the Hab. Jeremy has been creating a set of modular elements that can be combined like lego pieces and Spencer has been utilizing those modular pieces to rough out several different internal “modules” of the Hab. Below you can see the first three modules we have begun designing. The crew bunks, a bathroom/laundry area, and a couch seating area.

Crew Bunks

Bathroom/Laundry

Couch Seating

These are still very early screenshots. There we be lots of detail added in the final designs, especially when we start to apply more textures. With Spencer working on these models full-time we expect lots of progress in the coming weeks.

We are taking a lot of care in designing this habitat not as a sprawling space base out of a science fiction film, but rather a dense, functional living space that would be reasonable for an early mission to Mars. The Hab is one of three planned structures that will make up the Foundation Base Camp. The others are a greenhouse and laboratory, which we will begin building soon.

Lacuna Passage - Day/Night Cycle Time-lapse

Here is a time-lapse video of our newly rebuilt time-of-day system. Enjoy!

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #28 - Time-of-Day and Weather Managers

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #27 - C# State Managers and Oculus Rift Implementation

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #26 - Development Since GDC

After returning from GDC last month we have come back to development with a renewed vigor. I met some great people and attended some great sessions, all of which have inspired the direction we will take from here on out. Today I want to discuss some of our current objectives.

One of our big focuses right now is to polish up our dynamic music system. Over the last several months we have determined that our music solution might be a valuable addition to the Unity Asset Store. The system we have designed solves a unique problem that we think other developers might be able to benefit from (you can see an early version of the system in this devlog video we posted a while back). With the announcement during GDC that FMOD will be free for indie developers with small budgets we were worried that our system might become redundant, but after looking at the pros and cons of using FMOD we are convinced that our system provides a simpler and more streamlined workflow for developers looking to utilize dynamic music stems without the need for an external editor. We will likely charge a small amount for our scripts on the Asset Store to see if we can subsidize part of our development cost with the income.

Some of you may have heard of the game Extrasolar which utilizes a non-real-time photography mechanic. The developers of Extrasolar gave a talk at GDC called “Game Design at 0.0003 FPS” where they detailed some of the specifics of their system and it got me thinking of ways we could benefit from this approach. We obviously still have to maintain a decent frame rate for the exploration elements of Lacuna Passage (which the player can influence by selecting different quality settings), but when the player chooses to take a photo we have some leeway. We can render a higher quality screenshot from a secondary camera with more image effects than the primary game camera at the cost of only an extra half second of rendering time.

These are some examples of non-real-time photos taken from the game Extrasolar. Click to see the full resolution.

For those with high-end gaming rigs, taking a photo will take almost no time at all and the quality will be identical or even slightly better than the quality of their game-view camera. Those with lower-end hardware running on low quality settings will still get the same high-quality photographs just with a slightly longer rendering time (still less than a second). Since we don’t have to worry about rendering multiple frames per second when taking a photo we can create a unified quality for all photos for all players. This is especially useful when we look at our VR implementation. Obviously we can’t take a screenshot of the view straight from the Rift or we get a distorted, double-vision photo. Below you will see what a photo taken from the Rift looks like with our new secondary camera system.

Top image is the view from the Rift cameras. Bottom image is the photo taken from that view. Click to see full resolution.

We have also been working to improve our asset pipeline so our artists can produce content faster and more efficiently. An important part of this process is our Asset Previewer. Our Asset Previewer is actually a small separate Unity project that contains all of our shaders from the game and some tools for viewing assets that help to ensure that when they are put in the game they will fit with the scale and style of all the other existing assets. This is extremely useful for us since we cannot afford to purchase Unity Pro licenses for all of our artists. They can preview assets with this project in the free version of Unity and I can import them into the main project later.

Recently we added a feature that lets us export animated gifs straight from the Asset Previewer to create seamless turntables of our assets. Between these gifs and other screenshots we can get a great idea of what an asset will look like before we ever need to place it in the game. Here are some examples.

The weeks since GDC have been extremely productive for us and we hope to keep up this pace. If there is anything else you’d like to see about our development just let us know in the comments!

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.