Developer Blog #4 - Cloudy With a Chance of Being Replaced
"I thought you guys already had clouds..."
Our game has been present in development using planes and jpegs for skies for almost entirety of it's existence. I have used this approach in both of the trailers to achieve some pretty decent results.
However, we wanted to use a more modern and sophisticated tool suitable for a fixed perspective project like this, featuring authoring with the benefits of procedural generation, so we made our own sky and cloud system.
It is not the usual skybox, nor a plane or a png. Instead we are using something that works only inside our post-processing volume.
As we rely heavily on exact cloud formations and compositions — this system allows us to control that, while introducing generation elements such as noise, thickness, smoothness, extinction etc.
The clouds can also cast shadows on themselves, receive real-time lighting from the sun and the sky itself. All this is possible using only one single channel texture as an input.
How it works?
It consists of 2 main parts: a foreground layer and a background layer.
The foreground layer is the meat and is generated from the input texture, allowing to draw any shape as base. Then this shape is authored through generative elements.
The background layer plays a supportive role by introducing more randomness and believability to it, while being generated solely from noise.
Results
I'm still getting used to all the settings and knobs, but here are some of them in action.
A long time has passed since the second trailer and the last behind-the-scenes look at REPLACED. And today I want to touch on a new topic — the animation of the game.
The game has come a tremendously long way since our first simple asset store-purchased animation pack, the first in-house animated sprite of an idly standing unnamed hero (who later will become known as R.E.A.C.H.), then to an actually controllable walk cycle and, couple years later, to what we have today.
When tackling the animation, we are following 3 main principles, all of which were defined very early and had been present to this day:
1) Handcraft
All of the game's animations are hand-drawn, which means we are not taking any shortcuts when producing those literal hundreds of sprites. Maybe in the future we will use other tools and techniques, and we have tried many, but with REPLACED we really want to honour the craft.
2) Realism
The tone of the game, the setting and design goals we set early on are the things that naturally dictate the style of animation. It's made to be believable, alive and beautiful, while also balancing to be integrated for comfortable and responsive game play, unlike the cinematic platformers of the past, where realism of movement and technical limitations dictated a much less comfortable game play approach.
What really is an icing on the cake, in my opinion, is that we have developed a system to double down on an almost continuous, cut-free movement. It means that almost every move or state in the game is interconnected with other moves through a fully animated transition, which almost looks like an animated 3D model.
3) Impact
While removing the hassle of what came with the limitations of the past, we really wanted to somehow still capture this feeling of weight and action impact, so the character will be perceived like a person, rather than a freely floating block in the world. After a ton of experimentation I personally believe we have found something of a sweet spot.
Pulling this off required a lot of stress and a lot of iteration to get that feeling of silky-smooth continuously animated characters, which behave realistically in a cut scene, in platforming, or in combat.
As we are closing in on finishing the full move set of our protagonist, counting more than couple hundred pieces of animation alone, I personally believe this will be one of, if not the most complex pixel-art game ever made.
Keep a look out for more development blog updates!
One of the make or break features of such heavily stylized games is lighting.
As you have seen in the trailer we are utilising a lot of volumetric lights to create rich, dense, and high quality atmosphere.
That said, we had to rely on a lot of plugins last year to get to a level of quality we were after. That approach was at the very least… inefficient. In the real world it just runs badly. It is very conflict-spreading with other 3rd party assets and in some cases just plain outdated.
As we had moved to our custom rendering tech at the end of last year -- we have been slowly crawling towards our goal of implementing back all the features we wanted to be done our way and one of those features is finally available for me to test -- custom made, state of the art volumetric lighting and density volumes.
It looks far better than things we used before, it is made in-house and is tailored to compliment the game perfectly.
It allows us to flexibly add things such as:
Dust Fog Mist Light Shafts etc.
This all contributes to cinematic lighting and composition to enable us to create the desired atmosphere. Once again an amazing feat by our graphics engineer!
GIFs shown are not final but can give you some idea of what to expect, as well as some new amazing assets by our team.
Here at Sad Cat we would like to address the release date shift of REPLACED.
First of all we have to admit: game development is hard. It's also rewarding in its own right, but mostly it's just hard. We would like to pay our respects to every team who delivers their project – no matter how small or big it is. It's a tremendous achievement.
After REPLACED initial announcement in 2021 and its follow-up trailer in 2022 we had this incredibly high bar of community's expectations. And at this point we knew that we can't afford to release a sub-par game. We truly want REPLACED to be something special and memorable for everybody. This is our first game, and we want to make every aspect of it the best it can be.
We want to stress the fact that we do understand the game's scope, and we're very aware of traps of over promising and under delivering. As of today, development is progressing at a steady pace. The majority of systems are functional now and we are in a super-intense asset production phase, which is currently our main bottleneck. Our quality bar is incredibly high. To give an example of this, the main character in REPLACED has more than 500 meticulously hand-painted animations made just for platforming (luckily, these are all finished now). We want to deliver every aspect of the game to the same high standard and that requires additional time and effort. Unfortunately this also means we have to delay the game’s release.
Once again, we would like to thank everybody who supports us (honestly: we could not stop reading your awesome comments after initial trailer release)! If you are interested in some of the behind the scenes of REPLACED and learning more about the development process — feel free to join our Discord server, where we share our developer blogs, thoughts, cats and just have a nice chat with our community.
Sad Cat Studios Team
Developer Blog #1: Environment
Creating the right environment
The world of REPLACED consists of hundreds and thousands of meticulously detailed props. Trash on the streets, old dumpsters, phone booths, lamps, post boxes, cars, retro computers — you name it... I think we got it… somewhere.
With this level of detail and amount of stuff to create we had to come up with a consistent workflow for creating environment assets that are highly stylized and read as pixel-art, yet imitate physical properties of real materials to fully take advantage of real-time lights and shadows.
We have been experimenting a lot going about how we can retain the definite pixel-art flavor while doing detailed 3D props. The answer was a tough pill to swallow though: we have to do everything by hand. Every single prop, every single diffuse texture, every additional map and, of course, the models themselves.
Additional maps? Damn boi, a lot of 'em. Even though it seems that it's simple: just put pixel art on a mesh and that's it you dumbass...
Tried that too, but to achieve a modern look that plays well with lighting, post effects and dynamic placement your props should behave modernly too:
"What if the player moves that crate under a lamp post?" "What if a searchlight goes through that window?" "What if ... you just want to reuse the prop in other lighting conditions and save yourself a sleepless night creating another vending machine again"
To allow all those cases to look natural and beautiful we basically need to draw every prop a couple of times:
Diffuse Specular Color Glossiness Normal Map Alpha
All those things create a kind of asset that takes full advantage of the game's world while undoubtedly pixel-art in presentation.
With the help of our Rendering Engineer we created custom shaders that are tailored specifically for what we are building, we have developed guidelines for all the material types, seasoning and color palettes.
Even though it's a massive undertaking to make that many textures by hand -- we hope the result will be 100% worth it.
Stay tuned for more development blogs!
Wishlist REPLACED now! Join the official REPLACED Discord Server Join the official Coatsink Discord Server
REPLACED's E3 Soundtrack - VOID - now available for streaming
As revealed during Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live Show to kick off Gamescom, we’re delighted to share with you the full track from the E3 Trailer of REPLACED.
Sad Cat Studios and Coatsink treated fans to another brief look at the game before launching the backing track Void across various digital platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr5S61dEolg
Visit PlayReplaced.com/Void to get all the details on where to stream and listen to the track. We’ve even added the lyrics to the YouTube Description if you fancy singing along.
We just want to take a moment to thank you all for the kind words you’ve sent us and the support you’ve shown REPLACED since E3. We’re thrilled with the reaction to the game and we look forward to sharing more details with you in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU3kmjSD9tU
For now, visit playreplaced.com and follow us on Twitter @REPLACEDGame for all the latest updates.
REPLACED will launch on Steam in 2022 and Wishlists are NOW OPEN!
REPLACED ACCESSIBLE IN 2022
As we continue to celebrate the first ten years of Coatsink, we also promised to look at what’s coming over the next decade.
Announcing REPLACED, a retro-futuristic cinematic platformer with free-flow combat, coming to Steam.
Set in an alternative 1980s America, you play as R.E.A.C.H, an AI trapped in a human body against its will. Together, you will define a shared future as you discover the dark secrets of Phoenix-City, a society ruled by corruption where outlaws are rife.
Discovering the Dark Secrets of Phoenix-City
REPLACED is a sci-fi single-player experience that sees you unravel a deep and engaging dystopian story.
Following a catastrophic nuclear event, your journey will take one unexpected turn after another as you walk along the gritty streets of Phoenix-City. Using your platforming skills and combat reflexes, you’ll navigate a 2.5D stylized, cyberpunk inspired world, making careful allegiances and uncovering harsh truths.
We’ll be talking a lot more about REPLACED in the months ahead, and are looking forward to launching the game in 2022 on Steam.
Until then, make sure to follow REPLACED across our Twitter, Facebook, and Discord for all the latest news on the game.
