Welcome to Fantastic Weekly to follow our development process on our upcoming game: FANTASTIC ENERGY.
GAME DESIGN
The design side has been quieter this week and we have been concentrating more on the actual development. The store is undergoing some heavy designing now, but we will reveal more about that in next week's Fantastic Weekly.
We are still developing and refining the data-side of Fantastic Energy. It is very important to establish some good principles on how to present data in an understandable and FUN way.
Here are some examples of how we are going to test the data-visualizations in the Fantastic Data testing project that will be available in Finland within the upcoming weeks.
Now let’s get down to the development business.
CODE
Tipi:
I have been arm-wrestling with AR and rendering the data using the amazing graphics created by Noora. Fixed some UI elements and enabled the dynamic population of the AR scene. :) Also added the analytics, finalized the scenes, tweaked and hacked some parts and shipped out.
Olle:
Data on the energy usage of buildings proved to be even harder to process (quickly enough) than I thought last week. This week I wrestled with duplicate data. If I check for duplicates upon adding the data from the public data files to the server; it takes too long. If I check for duplicates after adding the data, there is so much data stored that it takes even longer overall (in this case the data was read in seconds, but removing duplicates takes days).
Finally landed on a proper solution, which also takes into account future data: during a request, if the data is not found, but is within the range available, a single data file that contains the data is read. The only issue is that the request of the clients will take longer, but should still get the result within seconds - which is acceptable :)
That combined with a daily reader should be the best solution.
Melissa:
This week I fixed a few bugs in our crafting system, and have started to work on our store system. I will start by doing a very basic UI for the store, and after that, we will plan it a little further.
GRAPHICS
Noora:
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the lighting of the game and that I’ve been thinking about ways to make it look a bit better than it is now. This week I’ve been doing some more research and I found an interesting presentation on Youtube by Ciro Continisio from Unity. He replicated a shader from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and also shared the project files for others to use and modify in their own projects. I wanted a bit softer look for Fantastic Energy so I modified the shader to have less sharp shadow and light transitions. I think it makes our objects and characters look even cuter than before!
Joviaal:
This week I have done only this little caterpillar, not much, but still progress. The final concepts are ready now on paper, and also some ideas for possible animations. I think it would be cute if the little caterpillar goes and hide in the pollution cloud.
Because possible hiding animation, this model is now a little bit different. Usually, I join everything in one whole object, but this time I leave some parts apart. That’s why the model is at the moment separated into the main body and the cloud part.
...And I know, caterpillars as all the other insects have six, not four legs…
Random fact: Although it seems like many caterpillars have more than six legs, they really have only six REAL legs, and then they have usually 6-12 prolegs! Prolegs are rather like claws, and they have only limited musculature. They also disap
pear when a caterpillar evolves into a butterfly.
Aapo:
This week I continued my work with homebase skins. After some compromising, and a lot of optimizing they are ready! To give you a closer look; I’m quite happy with this stump-house. It seems to have a lot going on with all the mushrooms and details but is actually under 500 tris/250 faces.
And here are pictures of the other skins:
Do you have a cool design idea of a homebase? Tell us! :D
Heini:
This week I have rigged and animated the lovely Pölkky character! I had to do quite a lot of weight painting on him as well, but after that everything worked as it should and onwards to animating I went! Joviaal said he is kind of an adorably clumsy character so I kept that in mind while animating his attack and he might stumble a little, heh!
After finishing with Pölkky I returned to 2D animation for a moment, because we definitely needed our own punnu inspired thank you gif!
Thanks for reading and cya next week!
With love,
Punnu Games team
