BleakV2 Devlog One - Camera

It's been a fair while since anything's been posted about BLEAK, and that's partly down to the fact that as a University project, it's been handed in and everything has begun to come to a close.

However I'm not resting on my laurels, instead I'm rebuilding Bleak to make better use of the things I've learnt whilst making Version 1.

Biggest change? No more UnityScript.

A full list of intended changes will be coming soon, as well as a download link for the 'completed' Version 1, once I've worked out the legalities of releasing something made with an Educational License.

Above is the state that Version 2  is at as of right now, nothing much at all other than basic camera functionality, including camera rotation and movement. Next up is zoom, and from there I break ground on recreating building placement.

Devlog 22-4-16

Long overdue Devlog, but I've been busy.

 here's the new look opening scene, I'm still experimenting with the building layouts, hoping to break up all of that blue. There's more off screen that's shown later because the camera continuously rotates.

those amongst you with eagle eyes and a ban from the Zoo might have spotted that 'QUICKSTART' has been replaced with 'NEW SANDBOX' It's a whole separate game mode that allows you to build away with almost every asset in the game, free from the concerns of products, population etc. Also pictured is the new Notification system, with more examples at the bottom of this post.

All the academic buildings have been modelled and textured, and ground's been broken on the Prisoner buildings too! whoop whoop!

And here's the promised dump of Notifications, a healthy mix of relevant and comical.

Bleak Devlog 9-4-15

Hey all.

Sorry it's been so sparse lately, had a break for Easter then took a bit longer than expected to get back into the swing of things.

First off, some bad news D:

Bleak's hand-in deadline is in three weeks. That doesn't mean no more Bleak, but probably less for sure.

But brace yourself for crunch time, thing's are about to go down :D

Here's what's been added and changed in the past week:

Some more work's gone into the overall look, tweaking the colour correction and re-enabling HDR really seems to make it pop.

Bunch more building's have been added as finished models, with everything else being filled in as temporary greyboxes. From left to right we have; Endgame Academic housing, Rocketfuel cracker, Midgame Academic Housing and the Chemical research Lab.

The old 1x1 solar panel was just too useful as a spacefiller, so it's been replaced with this bigger tower setup.

context-sensitive warning messages if there's something wrong when placing a building. Current criteria include:

• not enough materials
• not enough population
• Colliding with something
• Not enough money

And some more attention's been given to the tooltips on the more important UI. It's a work in progress for sure as I work out the best wording for things. Prisoners are certainly worth more than just saying THIS IS.

Devlog 15 - 3 - 16

Work is ongoing on regarding the readability of BLEAK. Newest addition is this thingamajig, a fairly substantial map kindly showing the player the ratios and production chains of all the buildings in BLEAK. Nowhere near as complex as those in Anno, but still valuable and pertinent information.

Also experimenting with adding a UI shadow to break up the shape between the production map and the Context menu.

The next steps for this menu is adding in more information into the small tooltip space, and hooking up the icons to the building list and actually being able to place buildings from there.

Exciting stuff :D

Devlog 03/03/2016

Super small update today, because it's only one evenings work :D



The initial demolition sequence now involves a fleet of shiny yellow bulldozers in front of the enormous crawler!

Bleak Comparison #1

So I was given the USB stick containing the pre-Christmas submission I made for BLEAK.

It's now march so I wanted to show you what two months work means.

It's a large image, so you might need to click it to show it in full.

Generally, everything's a little bit more polished. There's more image effects being used, the UI for the most part isn't using placeholder graphics, and the tone of the game's been made grittier through the colour correction.

There's a loading screen in between map selection and the main scene, primarily in order to avoid a period of the game appearing to do nothing whilst it loads a relatively asset heavy scene.

Devlog 01-03-2016

Slightly larger than usual update today, probably because there's been about a week since the last update.

I've started experimenting with Colour Correction, since a few people have commented that raw from Unity, the game seems very blue, and kinda bright. As it stands, the saturation of everything's been brought down, with the blue channel being lowered a little more. Experimenting with colour grading also produced this monstrosity:

It's now impossible to accidentally select more than one building to place. Previously clicking multiple times would instantiate multiple buildings, and they'd trigger eachother and wouldn't let you place any of them. Not anymore, as this GIF shows.

There's also a new effect on demolition of buildings involving particle systems and downward-sliding buildings. I'm not entirely happy with it, but work'll continue within the following weeks.

The UI on the main screen's also changed, now it exists solely along the bottom of the screen, balancing the screen more and also getting less in the way.