PCZ Studios - Psychosis Screen Shots Thread

Hi everybody!

We have some updated screen shots from our new game, Psychosis. We are still in the testing period, but we're finally close to finishing!
Take a look, and give us any feedback you have!

More screen shots to come!

Edited by: PczStudios

poor textures, poor models, poor detail, to big hud

Morgoth(TAdev) wrote: poor textures, poor models, poor detail, to big hud

duh its obliviously made for iphone or android... think about it before posting those kind of comments

I'm not a fan of the art side tho... too much brown but its still impressive

Edited by: casf01

I looked in the the models on the PczStudios link and the characters have better detail then I'm seeing in these in game shots. I would suggest working on character colors and shading to help make the zombies stand out a bit. Also all the rooms I see look very similar. More detailed textures and even better lighting might help make things more interesting and pull the player into the experience. I know it isn't easy when watching file size and all. Especially on a phone contrast on walls floors characters will help the player understand what is going on with such a small screen. Good luck with it.

Looks really cool - but I think you can make a lot of graphical improvements.

Graphics wise it's too brown for starters. The colors melt together in a bad way. You should give the zombies more color and make the environment textures more interesting. The HUD also needs some minor tweaking.

HUD
-Scale up the following elements: Cash, Time. They must be close to unreadable on the small phone screen. Make them twice as large or at least scale em up to 150%
-Make the crosshair either green or yellow. Pale, desaturated pink is a bad color because it merges into the brown all too well.
-Those swirling things in the bottom corners are not needed - they don't add anything. You should only have the controller circles there.
-The weapon element: Make the actual weapon larger and make those circle thingies (container?) smaller. As it is now the weapon is too small in relation to the container.
-The swirly arrows at the ammo-button: are they needed?

Zombies
-More color. You could for example work a bit on the pants. Make the diffuse grey and use vertex colors to paint the pants a pale, not-so-saturated color. Use different "pants colors" for different zombies. When it comes to optimization, vertex colors are much cheaper than having a separate texture for the pants. You also get more freedom as you are not restricted to 2, 4, 8 or how many texture maps you chose to have. You can have countless of color variants because it's all code-based.
-Make their skin more pale blue/grey, and maybe add some 1 bit alpha hair on the zombies (hair which should be colored). Take a look at the zombies in "The Walking Dead".

Environment
-Add more contrast and color to the level textures. Especially the floor needs more work and could be a lot more interesting.
-The wall textures could be made more interesting and realistic. Take a look at some concrete walls at www.cgtextures.com and get something like that. Or maybe brick?
-Try to stay away from having the ceiling - and the floor - in the same color as the walls. Try and split up the screen into three parts: ceiling > wall > floor, having no part blending/merging into the other. Take a look here at this Doom 2 pic: Mobilnova.com
-Try and work away some of the brown shades, starting with the gun (which should be grey/silver instead of brown).
-Bake lightmaps into the level. This way you can simulate shadows without taking a performance hit.

And last, something which I'm not sure is possible or not (might be too performance heavy):
-Add fog of war if you don't have any yet.

EDIT:
The TD (texel density) on the floor looks a bit low and could maybe be upped a bit. What size do you have on your environment texture maps?

Edited by: Nightshade

Hey guys, we really appreciate all the feedback. Seriously, we do. We are taking action right now to modify certain mutually agreed upon graphical issues.

Niteshade - Thank you very much for making the valid points. Lighting has been an issue due to the draw calls Each additional light causes lag, and at this stage we weren't able to afford the lighting. The same goes for fog of war. We tried experimenting with it for a while but the particle effects of the fog was very expensive.
The environment texture maps are 512.

Pixelator - Thank you for you comments. We had a lot of debris and glass on the floors, as well as individual lights as opposed to ambient lighting, but all of this was too expensive. We're also doing this with Unity and not Unity Pro, so we don't have the profiler to help us cut down on the code cycles and pin point the most processing intensive areas.

This was a very low budget project, we didn't have many resources to work with. Watch for our release sometime around April and support us so we can make something truly extraordinary!

- The PCZ Studio Team

No problem - always happy to help.

Some more thoughts:
Yea lighting is very expensive for mobile games, so there is no point in having static lighting in the game. But that doesn't mean that the game has to look bad. You can fake shadows with lightmaps (also known as "ambient occlusion maps") quite easily without taking a big performance loss. Basicly what you do is that you create a secondary UV set for say, each room in your levels (or even for the entire level) and then you do an ambient occlusion render to get a 1-channel (black n white) AO map for that section in the game. The AO map is "cheap" on the framerate because you connect it to the standard materials/textures via a multiply connection. (you multiply the colors of the AO map -onto- the environment textures). Also, since it's a one-channel texture, it can be larger than your RGB textures.

My second thought - or concern - is the blurryness of the textures. I find it odd that a 512 px floor texture get that blurry without HEAVY compression. Or did you mean that the entire level of the game uses a 512 map?

And what file format do you use for your textures? We use PNG's where I work.

EDIT: I would like to point out that while your RGB-textures should repeat and tile as much as possible, each UV-shell on the second UV-layout (for the AO map) has to have a unique area or the shadows will get fucked when you render the AO. It's not a big deal but it's a common mistake to do if you've never worked with lightmaps before.

Edited by: Nightshade