The Architect

Here is yet another tech demo (getting near to a game demo status now).
These last days I fullly rewrote the dialog system I used in all my previous game to a new kind of “cutscene” system. With real time 3D models I can finally integrate things like camera angles, animation blended head track/ eye track and even a rudimentary dynamic “lip-sync” so the characters can stop talking telepathically and actually move their lips and jaw during dialog.
The cutscene scripts are now written in plain xml files, allowing now not only to translate lines, but modding of the scene flow.
In the tech demo you can check the new dialog system and an exploration environment that can be traversed using a third or a first person view (including a test “objective”). Notice that despite being a fully 3D environment, the player will always walk it in a pre-determined path. This allowed me to cut a huge complexity in the scene set up, to use simple scripted cameras and still feature a simple but immersive first person walk mode (an early work that still feels janky). I hope it can be improved later.

-I’ve been diving a lot into Unity real time 3D tools these last days. The lightning baking tools for ambient occlusion / indirect lightning is really cool. -Also, the Cinemachine camera framework is amazing!!
-So… I tried to put some baked lighted environments together with real time lightning on characters to check if I could make it look fairly good.
-This new tech demo is the result, where you can move around a 3D environment using the same 2D “feel” of Goons Raid Her.
-There a lot of controls to test, so make sure to check the command list and try to find every interaction while exploring the 2 simple environments.
-Again, share your thoughts here. I’ve been learning a lot these day and I hope I can decide what project to work on soon.

I always been curious about working with a real time 3D system and this tech demo is the result of a couple o weeks messing with the third dimension Unity offers. Main main goal was to make a proof of concept of a very basic character clothing system and learning a bit about Unity’s real time illumination system. I don’t plan to use player controlled character movement in a 3D game yet (it’s a huge pain to make it right), but to build scenes with characters than can be much more dynamic than those in a 2D game.
But… Is real time 3D really better than 2D ? Of course, there are pros and cons.
The Good
It’s MUCH easier to implements concepts of character/environment customization in a realtime 3D game, and it’s my main interest on trying it. On a 2D game, each combination of customization/pose/animation needs to be pre-rendered or combined in some paper doll system that most of the time and have a lot of limits in terms if animation.
Setting up characters and simple environments in a 3D game takes a more of work on the beginning, but once the foundation is done it’s a lot easier to expand animation, illumination and camera angles without having to render countless images again and again (and waiting a lot for these renders). Animations can be combined in real time and produce some nice results.
The Bad
One more dimension adds a plethora of possible new problems. It demands better system specs, it can generate more different results in different hardware / drivers, it asks for a lot of work in optimization of models, textures and low level stuff I not much into, like real time shaders. Stuff like hair and “fluids” are also very hard to make right in real time 3D.
The Ugly, I mean… the Art
Which one looks better? Well… This is a mostly based on personal opinion. 3D can have great visuals (if you have a big team on a studio), but making a 2D scene “beautiful” is much easier in a one man army. It’s hard to tell if I could make something not much visually below the previous games. Also, there are “license complications” when using some third party assets in a real time 3D system.
So… What’s you opinion? Run the tech demo, move the camera around, try different clothes and “shapes”. Then post what do you think of it.. It would be cool to hear your thoughts.