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September Progress Update!
🕑 Added 2017-09-03 09:33:18 +0000 UTCHey guys!
We’ve had a really productive month, but I’m going to try to cram the details into a single post this time around! Start off by checking out the video above and I’ll meet you below after that!
By the way, before you get too excited, we don’t plan on making Onyx a playable character. I explain below why she’s turned into our guinea pig :D.
Map and Environment Progress
I figured I’d start here since we have the first nearly complete maps from v0.06 to show off! I’m personally blown away by the quality we’re now achieving with physically based rendering, so even though it’s been a hurdle to overcome the learning curve I can say that we’re now finding our stride and getting high quality results.
Ubercharge spent the first part of the month converting and improving our large city asset library for Redshift, and after doing so was able to test out some advanced techniques for procedural damage/vegetation. This technique quickly allows for our licensed assets that appear too clean to fit into the dark and grimy style we need for our city. In addition to testing out a new technique for modeling wires using splines in 3DS Max, he then moved on to building out structures we need for the slums, and has also made more progress on the platforms for the wall the player must descend to sneak into the city.
Ubercharge had to go out of town for a week in the middle of the month, but once he got back he banged out most of the work on the first map you’ll see in v0.06. This is the alley where Neon and Malise leave their bike as they venture into the Void. You can check out a perspective view of the area here, showing the details that we can get with the new rendering engine a little better.
During the last half of the month, TK has been overcoming hurdles left and right with Substance Designer/Painter, and has really upped his game with the custom texturing job he’s done for the Splicers’ Gate map. Here’s the (nearly) final version! I’ve assembled a small batch of progress images as well to show some of the work going into it! This map took a whole lot of effort, but is an example of the quality you can expect in the future!
Lastly, I wanted to show off the latest diagram of the map area for v0.06. For the first time, you can see how we intend for the city to be a non-linear world space, and in part explains why I wanted to finish the story in order to get the map design elements right.
Onyx PBR Conversion and Genesis 3 Animations
I learned a lot during the creation of the fem-cop character we showed off last month. Probably the most important thing however was that I shouldn’t try to adapt to a new rendering style in a vacuum, which unfortunately is what I did, and is why I had a lot of difficulty calibrating the brightness/saturation of the textures/materials/etc. Ubercharge suggested I try to rework it by calibrating it to a reference scene. Instead of using the cop, I decided to use Onyx, a more familiar character and one that I had a baseline reference for in the old style.
What I ended up doing was converting Onyx to the new physically based rendering style using one of the reference artwork pieces for the Void we’ve picked up along the way. The above image is the result, and I have to say I’m really pleased with the PBR materials, new skin (yeah, it was redone again), brightness values, and lighting this time around (just to reiterate, that background isn’t ours :D). You can check out the high res version here! The background I chose most resembles the mood and lighting levels that we are going for in the Void and most likely with the updated style in general (as you can tell by the new maps).
I’ve uploaded a gallery containing close-ups, comparison images to the old materials, and commentary regarding the improvements over the old materials as well as what I learned during the process.
This process was pretty time consuming (largely due to inexperience and some trial and error as opposed to the amount of work), but hopefully the amount I learned and progress I made with the style is obvious in the quality of the result. Doing this work panned out really well for us though. Now that she’s been calibrated to the proper brightness/saturation, we’ve used her immensely as a test character for sprite lighting and other tests involving the new art style.
On that note, I had to create animations for her in order to properly use her as a test sprite. This wasn’t as simple as copying the animations from Neon and Malise, since Onyx uses the newer Genesis 3 body type. I’m sure you noticed the improved boob bounce in the video above (here’s a looping GIF for your pleasure)! This is a direct result of the improvements available with this new body type, and is a great example of why we want to upgrade all our characters to it before making the switch over to using Maya for animation.
Map Sprite Lighting / Blending
This had been a topic of discussion amongst the team over the past few months, and it culminated in a huge effort by all team members this month (special thanks to AltairPL for working so much on the test environment that’s not only allowed me to test these crazy ideas, but also given us the chance to show it off to you guys). Ubercharge and I were originally of the opinion that map sprites needed to fit into the environments better, especially with the upcoming improvements to maps using Ubercharge’s new rendering engine (which will be used in v0.06). Ubercharge proposed a relatively simple system that works like an advanced version of our current shading system (the one that causes a character to darken when they walk into a shadow).
The system works by using two versions of a sprite: one showing strong lighting and the other showing a baseline ambient lighting (the actual sprites look better than that by the way :D). It samples colors from points around the character mapped to two hand painted images that represent the light intensity and color around map. It uses these samples to blend colors/values into these two sprite versions, before finally blending the two sprites together. The result is a sprite that blends into the map much better than our current system. It also emulates strong lighting, as well as colored lighting.
I want to point out that the footage in the video was taken within our new URGE engine. Unfortunately, the fancy version of the system in the video requires blending algorithms that URGE can use, but aren’t available to RPG Maker. We’ll be using a similar but not quite as good-looking method for v0.06.
Some of the benefits of the new system are as follows:
- Colored lighting
- Real time reflections (yes, APL banged them out after our last Inner Circle update – these will even work in RPG Maker!)
- Able to simulate dark areas much more accurately.
- Layered sprites with dynamic and independent shading for each layer
- Multi-layered sprites add the potential for glow maps (Neon's armor could for instance glow in dark areas instead of being darkened with the sprite).
- While not technically part of the sprite system, we’ll be introducing a new layer to the maps to better incorporate sprites underneath things such as light glares / haze / static fog. Here’s an example.
- Surprisingly low performance cost (maybe even improves over the old shading system in some situations ).
Check out this album for the technical details and additional screenshots!
V0.06 – A “Soft” Artwork Overhaul
So, if you haven’t noticed, v0.06 is going to contain a lot of elements of the new artwork style. For a while I was waffling really hard about how to proceed with v0.06’s art since I obviously want to get it out as soon as possible, but at the same time I knew our maps would be using this new style with which basically none of our old artwork would fit.
With the huge improvements required for the sprites to look good it’s become evident to me we need to transition to the new art style now, otherwise v0.06 will look like a weird mess of inconsistency. Since we’ve been out of the public eye for a while I want this next release to be jaw-dropping, and half baking it isn’t going to do that. Believe it or not though, getting the sprites to look good was probably the toughest part of this process, and now that we know it can work I’m super relieved. My point here however is that I’ll be spending a little additional time to convert Neon, Malise, and Ven to the new physically based rendering engine, and will use these models throughout v0.06. I’m calling this and any random things we need to change for the sake of consistency “Phase 1” of the planned artwork overhaul. Phase 2 will take place after v0.06, the majority of which will consist of upgrading characters to the new body type, improving clothing models where necessary, the conversion to 1080p, following through with 3D based armor damage and liquid simulation, and finally conversion of characters for use in Maya.
Improving our technology isn’t the only thing related to the artwork overhaul. In addition, we intend to solidify the style of the game; something we have more freedom to do now that we have the talent to create more custom assets. As such, I threw together a quick mood board sampling inspiration for the direction I envision MATM to take during the artwork overhaul. The purpose was to translate my ideas to the team visually, but I think you guys might find it interesting also. You can see a lot of it coming through already in our recent designs. The new look is more cinematic, and will feature a blend of dark cyberpunk / outrun / retro styles, which I think work well with the fact that MATM Is a retro RPG. It also doesn’t hurt that these things are coming into their prime in modern pop-culture, so it would be neat to be working on something artistically relevant.
Anyways, now that you’ve seen where we’re headed stylistically, that brings us to…
Cars!
Ubercharge has been out of the country these past few days, and since he doesn’t have access to his rendering rig he’s been using the downtime to help develop the idea that we’ve come up with for the style of vehicles throughout the game. There are going to be a lot of city environments in the game, and obviously there needs to be vehicles. Unfortunately, we can’t create all of these from scratch, so we’ve had to get creative. Since we’ve got some retro elements in the new style, we’ve decided to purchase retro car models and cyberpunkify them. Uber and I have therefore been passing concept paintings back and forth, homing in on a few car models we want to create in 3D. Here’s a gallery showing the results! I’m personally really excited about what Uber’s done with these, and am really looking forward to seeing them completed. Please let us know what you think!
That’s it for now; as always, feed us your input, and thanks so much for all your support!
Comments
MrChiMasterSir
Hey guess what Jessica? Two years later and no v0.06 yet.
They post screens from letest versions, they have them, but no new links in downloads ((( T.T
Guy
$10 patreon here, I promise they're posting updates with proof that they've been working, the more I read tho the more im disappointed like you that the game's still in such an early stage... although it's understandable, we're basically funding a full game development at this point.
BoogerBrigade
the $3 patrons are getting heavily screwed over lately. No big updates in a long time. Spent a whole year funding it and only got a demo I've had since I've started. Maybe cut us some slack soon?
PhatsM
Can't wait to see Malise and Neon converted over to their new character models. It feels like the next release is a ways off still, but progress seems to be going at such an even keel I can't say that I mind.
There will be a pretty big movement overhaul once we get around to it :D. We are planning on getting rid of the tile movement and changing to pixel movement. Diagonal running is one of the things we are considering (it's even in the video, but without diagonal sprites). Using the layered sprites for the new lighting system requires additional resources (multiplied by the number of layers for a character), so I'm not sure yet whether we would include diagonal sprites. If we don't, then it'd end up looking kinda like Chrono Trigger's movement system.
I understand, but my point was will there be news on the release, not the actual release date, like shall we expect it this year or 2018 ? From what i read, it will probably take few more months at the very least. I hope it will be ready till Christmas :D Also its good to hear you guys are improving !!! Keep up the good work.
Reason why estimating release is hard is that we do something we never did before. Also lots of art changes, and lors of tech difficulties. Also now we are setting up art style to be consistent throughout game so we dont want to rush it up. To sum it up its not like same cod with yearly releases
Verdonator
With so much progress, this makes me want to be the little cunt who always wants more features, like animated battles :D
Will there be any news on the 0.06 release date soon?
Antilles
MatM is a grimy, dystopic, cyberpunk future though. They'd all be cars that have been retrofitted to be electric as nobody could afford actual new cars down in the slums. They look like the cars in Looper or Elysium with a heavy '80s aesthetic.
Chris
Really good progress, the increase in quality is fantastic. With the time its taking to make the for battles and cutscenes. If you continue with sprites please consider doing diagonal running. I know it doubles the workload but it does look so much better.
Dirtyc101
Great update, but not thrilled with the cars. They look like modern cars with body kits. If you want to "future-ize" them, start thinking about what technology is going to be replaced/displaced. For example, future cars probably won't have huge hoods, as we probably won't have gasoline engines. Similarly, ditch the pop up headlights for LED strips, and maybe do a image search on airless tires.
Kerryberry
Yes and maybe a pregnancy state/debuff after getting creamed by certain enemies along with inflated belly variations of the standing images but that's just my haramase fetish x: I know it would be pretty hard to do but it would be nice to have an option to play with some kind of conception/contraception mechanic
Martin
Justice dictates that I have to chime in on the "hot black ladies" part. Aside from white characters and "white" characters with asian traits, coloured women seldom gets portrayed in Ero-games. That just won't do. A bit of melanin- and curves variation would be appreciated and quite refreshing.
I gues i missed that discussion :) well, this game will be great any way :)
Kerryberry
Has a really lovely retro/starcraft 1 vibe to it, I fucking love the magic of the locations and lighting <3
dudman
Personally I just love how the style looks, and Onyx is hawt as hell! Say, out of curiosity will there be any hot black ladies in the game? Also imho the character who tanks (Example Neon in the solid core) should have a taunt ability to draw the enemies attention. Oh and we need more tentacle monsters! lol Keep up the good work guys, I know that this is gonna be awesome :D
dudman
I can't remember exactly when, but I believe it was already discussed that there wouldn't be any transexual enemies or characters(Pre tetra system release I believe)... But people can changer their minds
please no
Love it. Great job guys. Looking forward to v0.06 release. Hope its not going to take 2 more years :) Buy the way Ero, have you thought about adding Transexual type characters. Dunno if other ppl here likes shemale's but i would like to see some Tranni enemy's. Maybe even that officer girl that you showed early. Well but this is just my thought's :)
Tanner
RELEASE!! RELEASE!! RELEASE!! RELEASE!!
Wow! Nice job guys!
Antilles
Loving those car designs! They're the kind of think I'd expect if Neill Blomkamp made a Neuromancer film, love it! And APL managed to get REAL TIME REFLECTIONS in RPG MAKER!?!?! That is crazy. As for Onyx, I'm fine with her being an NPC but she better get properly worked over at least once!
Faithel
Amazing
JosephStylin'
The environments look really good(well everything looks really good)! This reminds me of the new wave of beautiful pre-rendered cRPG's like Pillars of Eternity or Shadowrun Returns.
Hope you guys like my addition to the team effort, It was a huge challenge to completely overhaul game style, but Im glad it was worth it and also very happy how sprite blending turned out to be. Still some difficult tech research ahead, but would be best to establish stable art quality that can be good enough to last throughout the whole (will be quite long) game. oh and yes, I am quite impatient for next release as much as you are :D Ero wants it really polished
Dumbledoor
Looking good! And although I'm sure we're all anxious for the next public update, don't rush it, this definitely has the potential to be a quality finished product.
jin
while i had fun imagining her "in the rooster" im sure you meant "in the roster" unless there is something foul afoot that i was not currently aware of, if there was, i shall feather my response accordingly.
Purple Witch
Hey! This is, as usual, very good work, and I know it's hard to put demos out although that would be lovely. Otherwise I would like to point out, as a fan, that I would really love to have Onyx in the rooster, like, really, really, really, really...because she's awesome and sexy and..hmmm, very tantalizing... <3 Or have a scene player or some eye candy with her aswell? Anyway, keep up the good work, and I'm impatient to be looking in the next release!
Wowwww she looks so damn hot great work
Mostacho
Wow Eromancer-Team that's all realy impressive! Iam realy curious about to see your great work in a playable demo anytime. It looks truely high qualitative. You all are knowing how to raise up your quality of your work - I love it to know to support a team that wants to give next the best quality of there project! Iam rightly proud of the way the project is taken. Great Work!
Krio Syne
The game is looking AMAZING :D Keep up the good work :D i CANNOT wait until the whole game is out ^^
