- Added a new miracle : "Ho Ho Ho" only available each year during christmas.
Disclaimer : The result of this miracle may vary depending of your karma. ^^
- Removed the holes in the wooden houses as requested by the community.
- The tutorial has been improved and extended.
- Added a link to the discord server of the game in the main menu.
- Added a link to the manual of the game in the main menu.
Balancing & Tweaking :
- Reduce tornado sound volume.
Bug fixes & optimizations :
- Updated to Unity 2018.2.18.
- Prevent the creation of multiple new towns in the same frame.
- Reduce the memory footprint of the humans looking for resources to gather.
- Reduce the cpu footprint of early european towns.
What's next? :
Expect a Dev log really soon about the roadmap for 2019. There is a small hint about what i'm doing behing the scene for the next big update.
Update EA-1.21 - Childrens are back!
What's new?
- Added 17 child models.
- Added new human animations.
- A colored outline is now drawn around the current touched human.
- Added a better generic model for distant humans.
- Added more information visible to the player when he grab a human
Balancing :
- Reduce trees generation rate
Bug fixes :
- Prevent acacias to be pushed by walking humans.
- Sakura and Savanah miracles are now affecting the moon properly.
- Human model should not briefly change to a cylinder on grab anymore.
Dev Diary #2
I made some progress on the childrens and they will be in the next release of the game. The game now contains 84 differents human models and I plan to add even more models during the developpement. These models are funded by the purchase of early adopters like you so I can't thank you enough for your support. Without you the game would be very different than it is today!
As you can see there is a more modern model on the left of this picture. This is a sneek peek on what is worked on behind the scene. If you have ideas for models that you hope to see in the final game don't hesitate to tell me in the comment below. I would also love to ear what you think about the new models. :)
So many cool things happened to me this week!
I received some gifts from Oculus that will allow me to finally try the game with the consumer version of the touch controllers and also to try to run Deisim on a mobile VR Device.
It is probably a good time to try to improve the experience of Oculus players so if you have ideas of improvements of the controls for you don't hesitate to post a comment about it too.
I also received some news from Valve and i'm glad to announce that they will send me a Knuckles EV3 dev kit. This should allow me to do some work in advance to be able to support them when they are release to the public.
It is all for this week. I hope you enjoyed reading the article. Tell me If you want me to talk about a specific subject in the next one and don't hesitate to join me on Discord. I'm on it daily to interract with the community. :)
Dev diary #1 : Humans!
The genesis (pun intended) :
When I started working on Deisim the humans were simply a bunch of Unity cubes and it cost me almost nothing to include children. Childrens are like other humans but a bit smaller and they are too weak to work. At some point they become adult and start being productive for their community. This is also the moment where they can choose to become Priest or Heretics.
Just before the early access release a cool guy took a bit of his time to make 4 humans characters in blender for Deisim and I quickly included them in the game. They were not perfect but definitely cooler than my original creations.
The game is not a big success yet but thanks to all of you I am now able to invest into art and to bring Deisim to another dimension of quality. There is now 44 different human adult models into the game and 40 more are currently made for the children.
When I get the models they are modeled and textured but they are like statues and can't be animated so I must rig them.
I don't really have rigging skills so I cheat a bit by using an online tool made by Mixamo that allow to apply a rig to a model. You upload your 3D model, place different markers to key elements of the body like the knees and elbows and voila the character is rigger with some computer wizardry.
Of course that rigging is probably not as good as it would be if it was made by a professional but for Deisim this is good enough.
Once the character is rigged I import it into unity and tweak some import value to give it the right size compared to the others. Then I try to auto map the generated rig in Unity's mecanim system. Most of the time it works fine but sometimes something goes wrong and I must tweak the values.
I must then make a Prefab with the new models and the animator controller that all humans are sharing. Finally I modify some scripts to describe when this character model will be used.
All of this must be done for each model and it takes time so I include them only when I know that they will be visible in the game.
I hope you enjoyed this first article about the developpement of Deisim. Let me know if you want more of articles like this in the comments below or in the discord channel.
Thanks to all of you for your support! :)
Update EA-1.20 : Savanah!
What's new?
- New terrain miracle added : Savanah.
- New African culture!
- The Rotation of the God locomotion has been completely reworked. Don't hesitate to give it a try if you disliked the previous version.
- The tornado should now affect the humans correctly.
- Fixed the weight of many trees and buildings to avoid them to be throwed too far by the tornado.
- Fixed a bug that was breaking the oculus touch interaction when an Xbox controller was detected by the oculus runtime.
What is next?
I will try to communicate with you on a more regular basis (probably weekly) to get you informed of how things are going and what problem I have.
The good news is that childrens will be back very soon with brand new 3d models! Expect also more Buildings for the African culture in future updates too.
Thank you all for your support and feel free to put your remark and suggestions here! I'm always glad to read all your feedback and cool ideas about the game. :)
Update EA 1.19 - Divine Favor
I'm back from my vacations and happy to bring to you this new version of Deisim with a huge rework of the animations and more depth to the humans!
Changes
- The cities will now remember if you have been kind or rude with them.
- Humans animations are now dynamically modified to reflect their happiness.
- Reworked human animations.
- Humans are now praying during their free time.
Don't hesitate to put in the comment what you want in the game for the next patch :)
Update EA-1.18 : Better Humans!
New models for Humans (Tribal, Romans, Medieval, Egyptian, Asian and Vikings)
- New models for Priest and Heretics.
- The Karma is no longer affecting the radius of miracles. This was disturbing for many players.
- New Music System that should fix the bug of sound stopping when the world become too large.
- Balance mana gain to avoid mana to be gained or drop too quickly
- Fixed a bug preventing the player to grab miracles on some circumstances
- Fix Tornado mana cost
- Fix Human Info displayer should now face the player properly
And as usual various small optimizations.
Update EA-1.17 : Asian Culture, Sandbox Mode and Tornadoes
- New Asian Culture available for supreme deity
- New Sandbox mode available in the options (toggle to disable mana pool and unlock all miracles)
- New Brush Size Selector (toggle the new button in the spell menu to thow terrains with a radius of 1 around the touched empty terrain)
- New Tornado Miracle!
Bug fix :
- Fixed the bug that was preventing the player to grab trees and houses for the first time.
- Misc optimizations.
- Migration to Unity 2018.1
Update EA-1.16 : Trade and Pyramids
Cities can now trade resources between them.
Desert Cities can now build pyramids.
Other changes :
- Increased the forest density to make them more believable.
- Updated Unity to 2017.2.2 : It should fix the issue of controller disapearing for WindowsMR users.
- Improved tree foliage color.
- Trees no longer collide between each other.
- Added decorative ground layers.
- Misc optimizations.
EA-1.16.1 :
- Fixed a small issue preventing raids to happen.
- The game no longer freeze during the loading of a saved world. Instead you see the world slowly building around you.
- Increased the radius of expansion of the cities. That should bring more diversity to the cities depending of the surrounding terrains.
- The tutorial has been modified to inform the player that humans are building on grasslands.
- The hands position have been tweaked and should now be more accurate to the players hands.
- Bug fix : The moon now absorb all miracles.
- A lot of work has been done on the humans to improve performance of large worlds and prepare the game for future optimizations.
- When you launch the game you are now able to select a launch option to force the use of SteamVR mode. This is useful if you are playing with a rift but want to benefit from the steamVR overlay. Take note that the hand position is less accurate in this mode and there is also a small overhead in terms of performance.
- Update to Unity 2017.2.1
And as usual various small optimizations.
EA-1.15.1 :
- Fixed a bug preventing to load some saved games.
EA-1.15.2 :
- Check OculusSDK compatibility before SteamVR compatibility.
- Miracles are now inactive until they are grabbed by the player.
- Humans moved by the god far from their home will find or create a new one
EA-1.15.3 :
- Fixed a bug preventing to save the game for some players
Anniversary - What's next?
1 year ago i pushed the button and released Deisim in early access. A lot of work has been done on the game since that day but there is still a long way to go. I tried to give to the players a way to drive the developpement of the game and I'm sure Deisim is now a better experience because of that.
The goal is to release the 1.0 of the game somewhere in May 2018. It will not necessarily be the end of the projet but it will be the right time to judge if the project have a future in it's current form and can be expanded or if it would be better to take a better start in a second game. In any case I will continue to bugfix the game in the long run of course as I always did.
What I want to be in the game before 1.0 :
- Modern Age
- New resources (Oil, Science)
- Tutorial to teach basic commands to new players
What could be done depending of the players will and the time I have :
- More Miracles
- More Disasters events
- Quests (Humans pray for something and you can give them in some way)
- More human reactions to player actions
- Creator Mode (Game mode focused on the world creation - details to be discussed)
- Ability to give name to the cities.
- Trade system (allow city to grow based on trade so the player is not forced to put all resources near a city to make it expand)
What could be done after 1.0 if the game is a success and allow me to do some investment in art :
- Change human clothes based on their civilisation/age
- A creature to train like in B&W
- Better Audio
Thanks to all of you that purchased Deisim and helped me to make it better. I will do my best to bring you the best VR god simulator that I can.
