September Progress Update! (Patreon)

Hey 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!