Tesla's revolutionary invention has been stolen by his archenemy Thomas Edison! Travel all around the world to get it back with the help of your comrades, explore the most attractive cities of the Victorian Age (New York, London, Moscow and Paris) in a steampunk sauce, action-packed adventure!

Post news Report RSS Dev Diary #2: Understanding, Decomposing and Recomposing

Understanding the errors we made, decomposing our work and recomposing it as it should have been.

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Today's news is a quite thoughtful one.
This is not an usual post, but something closer to our point of view. We'll talk about our errors during the development of The Steampunk League and how we managed to overcome them, not without time losses. Because of this, we have divided this article in three parts.

Understanding

During these months of development we managed to build a rather good product, at least from the feedback we received by the people who played The Steampunk League in the various fairs we attended.

However, attending too many fairs has been the greatest of our errors: we didn't really have anything completely working and we didn't have enough time to work on it, so that every new feature has been developed as addition of parts, much more than we previously did.
This led us to have an enormous quantity of bugs we couldn't completely fix, and that's why we haven't released any demo yet.Apart from that, while we were having many problems with UDK due to the difficulty in finding proficient UDK programmers, we saw how Unity3D was gaining more and more consents.
So, at the end of 2013, we put the two engines on the scales and then decided to rework all our project on the younger Unity Engine: the new version is offering us what we effectively need.

Decomposing

Starting from January, we began reworking our graphic assets: we found there was a lot of optimizations to do, both design-wise and graphic-wise, and here's the result!

Models demonstration: before and after the rework

As you may see, we managed to optimize many of the previous 3d models, especially for the environment, and to successively increase the polycount to make it slightly more HD.

Models demonstration: before and after the rework

While we had a max texture resolution of 512x512, we now have an increased overall quality. It's not time anymore to save space while working on textures!

Models demonstration: before and after the rework

Models demonstration: before and after the rework


Camera Changes

One of the few things that were criticized while playing the demo was the camera system. We were using an orbital third person camera, however we decided to use a camera system more familiar with our game genre: a spline-based camera. Our goal is to achieve a result similar to Legacy of Kain: Defiance.

Recomposing

After two months of work, here's what we managed to get, art-wise:

Screenshots from the new build!

Screenshots from the new build!

Screenshots from the new build!

Screenshots from the new build!

From now on we'll release stuff more often, keeping you updated with much more posts!

Thank you all for reading, and... Remember to support The League!

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