Ittle Dew – Trailer 3!
Enjoy!
Insider Bundle
Check out our insider bundle over at Groupees: http://groupees.net/ludosity !
Pay what you want for Bob Came In Pieces – And get insider access to all things Ittle Dew! Beta access, concept artwork, OST and more. Plus top contributers get to design a room and name a monster in the game!
The deal will last all Christmas!
Merry Happy!
Christian and heathen celebrations of dead people, slaughtered pigs and whatnot are upon us – and we at Ludosity certainly feel the joy aswell! Mostly by not working and wathing TV series at home instead.
Except for Boss-Man, he has to work all. ze. tiiiiime.
Hyper Princess Pitch
Our lead designer Daniel Remar goes home every night, after a hard days work, and relaxes by making his own games. Over the years he’s made Iji, Hero Core, Garden Gnome Carnagem and many others.
Today, December 1st, marks the release of his latest, Hyper Princess Pitch! We’ve been playing it and giving feedback for a while now, but we’re all excited that it’s finally seeing release, and we’ve been competing for highscore all morning now, instead of working =)
Check it out, as all his games it’s completely free, no strings attached. Watch trailer below for all the awesome, then download and play!
Also be sure to visit his donation page if you like the game!
Future plans, but first.. rest
Right now is a very interesting time, lot’s of things going down here. The 3DS games are both in final review at Nintendo with an expected January 2012 release; we’re half-way through porting GGC to iOS and Android; Ittle Dew just went from an episodic release around Christmas to a full-blown game released next summer; and lastly, we’re in negotiations with a publisher for a new exciting project which we hope to announce soon!
But to be perfectly honest, the thing we’re looking forward to most is a nice, long Christmas vacation. We’re in dire need of some time off, not having had a proper vacation in 2 years. I feel I could sleep for a week. But that’s a month off still, so, back to work! =)
Unity + Steam = True
Today we proudly announce the release of Steamworks for Unity on the Unity Asset Store!
It makes integrating Steamworks for your Unity game a breeze. It’s a fully managed .Net C# wrapper – meaning we have gotten rid of all the fuzzing about with C code, DLL’s and getting everything up and running. It will work out of the box, using C# instead of C.
We currently support the following API’s
- Achievements
- Leaderboards
- Cloud
- Stats
More API’s and features will be added free of charge as users request them!
Lastly, in a day or two we will also launch a Free version that fully supports Stats – no nags, no limitations! Completely free!
From Hoagies to Hearts
As can be seen in the latest trailer, we have gone from Hoagies to Hearts as the health-metric for the games heroine.
We don’t try to hide the fact that we’re hugely inspired by the Zelda-series for the development of Ittle Dew, but we do try to take it forward where we can. For example we have carefully decided on 4 items that work extremely well together, so we can get rid of the Item-menu and the item switch mechanic that we feel is cumbersome.
However, when we can’t really improve upon the formula, we don’t. There are a number of areas of design where we went around in circles for days before ending up with a design that’s very similar (if not identical) to how Nintendo solved the same problem back in 1991. This goes for the perspective, doors, some monsters, etc, etc.
We will probably have to defend our Zelda-homage more than once for being a rip-off. But I feel there are way too few good action-adventure games out there – see this as a counter-balance to just another FPS about pending doom in four shades of gray.
Sunday Crunch
I guess most of you are aware of the IGF Competition (you know, the one someone from Sweden wins every 2′nd year) – and the deadline for the 2012 submission is tomorrow! We’ll be entering Ittle Dew, so I have stocked up on soda and biscuits here at the Ludosity offices for a nice Sunday Crunch.
Ittle Dew isn’t the only thing we’re crunching today though, we’re also putting the final.reallyfinal.3.test touches (game artist joke) on the 3DS titles aswell, as they are due for master submission early next week. Busy busy!
Ittle Dew – New Gameplay Trailer
Showing off some pretty lighting and some new gameplay mechanics. Hope you like it!
Ittle Dew – Epicsode 1 will be released for Christmas 2011!
Lighting the castle
With our two 3DS projects being in the final stages of development we felt that we could move a human resource away from the 3DS projects to our backburner project: Ittle Dew. As I am that lucky resource I thought that I would write a blog post about the project – and my work on it – and steal some of the limelight from the 3DS projects. Being a programmer one would think that my blog post wouldn’t be interesting (just a bunch of math – amirite?) but this week I’ve been working on one of my favorite and also the coolest subject within game programming – shaders.
Image1 – Screen shot of the game before we added lights.
The last time we worked on project Ittle Dew it looked something like in image1. There’s nothing wrong with this picture, it’s still a nice looking game, but we wanted to do something more. We wanted to get rid of the flatness of the graphics and add some dynamicity to it. We accomplished this through lighting as it is one of the keystones for compositing a great looking image.
Lighting in games can be troublesome. For example, games are dynamic in nature it can be difficult to keep the lighting of the scene perfect in all scenarios – maybe the player destroyed the light source, maybe he/she moved it. There are also some technical problems – how do you shape the light to fit the environment. For example; Light can be represented as a sphere, brightest in the middle and fading as we get further away from the center. But what If that light is on a wall, we would have to account for that wall and change the shape of the light to a hemisphere so that the light doesn’t pass through the wall. Further still, what if there is a ceiling right above that light, we’d have to reshape that light to a quarter of a sphere (see image2). And what if there’s a suicidal robot frog just next to the … you get the picture.
Image2 – A sphere representing light being reshaped to fit the environment.
Since project Ittle Dew is a game in two dimensions and its level design is built up from cells in a grid the problem with lighting gets easier. First of all the light would be represented as a circle and not a sphere and secondly the grid based level design means that level objects always blocks one cell of light (not one and a half, not a third, etc). The solution I came up with was to draw a line from each light source to all the cells within the lights circle and check if that line is colliding with an object. If it is then it means that something is in the way of the light and this cell won’t get lit. If not, it means that the light has a straight line to travel and will make this cell brighter. Finally we added some fuzziness to this to allow the light to pass slightly through corners – to add the illusion that the light is bouncing on the objects.
Image3 – Left: The cells of light the fire creates. The brightest cell is in the middle of the fire, the darkest cells are where no ‘line’ of light could get to. Right: Smoothing out the cells over the actual game creates this result.
Watch the before and after below!
Image 4 – Before
Image 5 – After