BEWARE - devlog 2023/2024

Hello everyone, hope you're all doing fine, despite the high petrol prices. Here's an in-depth account of what I've been working on since the release of BEWARE v013:

At the beginning of July 2023, I started research and preparations for NPC behaviour, locomotion and animation. After analyzing all possible options for achieving more natural-looking motion, I started testing a solution that enables mixing classic animation clips with ragdoll physics and variable skeletal stiffness, with pretty good preliminary results. Then I moved on to face animation and lipsync which will be especially important for the in-car passengers. Unfortunately I had to purchase a used iPhone 11 which has a depth camera on the front side. This basically enables capturing face expressions via an app and transferring them to a character inside Unity3D. This new tech also opened the door for some motion-capture solutions, so again, more research and testing. And finally, the depth camera makes it possible to scan objects and convert those to 3D models. I tried to scan my son's face but he would always start laughing, ruining the result. Better luck this year, I hope...

My vision for the NPCs, especially the passengers, is something that feels real rather than looks real - and there are enough cautionary tales to avoid (ME:Andromeda being one of them). So basically, Imagine the kids in the car, bouncing around, jumping from seat to seat, reacting to the dangers present and past, while interacting with each other and us, the driver.

Towards the end of August it became clear to me that the NPC-related workload would take longer than I had hoped for - so I decided to postpone that for summer 2024, and since I'll need to record reference and motion-capture footage outside, this made even more sense. I thought I'd work on something that won't take that long, for the v014 update. Oh the irony.

But first I took a one month break from the digital world. Meaning I spent September with pen and paper, first writing down the story progression from beginning to end and defining all the interactions that will convey the player's experience. In parallel I began writing bits of dialogue and monologue for the NPCs, which felt somewhat weird, because I've never done that (my past films being all with no dialogue), but in the end I got into it and enjoyed the process. Finally, I interjected these writing sessions with drawing the final designs for the models that are currently still placeholders: the refinery pokey cars, the bus tourists, the "goons" and sketched designs for a new type of enemy car and some maintenance non-humanoid robots.

Beginning October, it was back to the computer. For years I've been wanting to have birds in the game (since 2013, to be precise) - but not just birds flying around in the sky. I wanted birds that would land and take off when scared, so I purchased a solution on the assetstore, took the time to understand the code, then modified it so it would work as I imagined, tweaked for better performance and made my own bird models and animations. By mid-November I had a working system with the possibility of hundreds of birds at minimal performance cost. At that point I could have released a v014 update (or rather v013Birds), but I felt that it wasn't enough new content to justify that.

So I decided to tackle the next task on the to-do list, the surface coal mine. v008 Preview had shown that it was too heavy, performance-wise, and the truck's AI behavior left a lot to be desired. To make it short: I created a much better performing and versatile navigation system, re-wrote the truck AI and "hacked" Unity's in-built local avoidance to be usable with vehicles, which was especially tricky on the narrow paths at the start of the mine. In v008 there were 16 trucks driving around - now the system can handle 32 trucks. It's somewhat overkill to have 32 of them on your tail - just one is already intimidating enough - so I'm thinking of making half of them not chasing the player but still being able to detect and alert the others.

I've also added water splashes, water dripping FX and the trucks leave tracks in the dirt behind them. Since I felt the mine area itself looked somewhat too bland, compared to the other regions of the map, It was a good time to refine the environment, adding bigger rocks and some crushed cars scattered around the area.

 I also added multiple fixed tire tracks from all the trucks driving around - this helps a bit with player orientation and makes it easier to know where the road is, thus allowing to drive faster. These were done manually by driving a truck around all the paths and recording the tracks geometry + pressure-based vertex color.

The trucks now also have a limited field of vision which makes it possible to stay undetected while driving behind them. There are still some minor fixes to be done there but by mid-march I had finalized a stable and predictable system for the coal mine area and visuals that correspond to the final vision. So I could have released v014 back then - but no. Driving around the area, I had to add one more thing that greatly increases the immersion: proper sound.

For a couple of days I searched the internet for high quality audio recordings to purchase, like the sound of tires rolling on gravel, wet asphalt, car wheels hitting puddles at speed, skidding sounds, wind buffeting and other sounds. Then I re-used and modified some of the code I had already written for the versions prior to the switch to VPP and it really makes the driving experience much more intense, in a good way. I just couldn't find a good transmission whine sound - I'll try to record the gear whine in my Jazz and see if it fits.

Which leads to the last task I've been working on these past four weeks: the engine sound. This has always bugged me... Years ago I recorded the real thing, with a good recording device and microphone, but in-game it doesn't sound like the real thing. Stable RPM loops @ 1000, 2000,3000,4000 and 5000rpm. Many people online write that simulating engine sound by cross-fading these in-game will sound like crap. And I found it very hard to find any kind of advice on the internet except that some specialized sound studios make a living doing this the right way and definitely won't share the secret sauce. Understandably.

In the past I've tackled this again and again, and always ended giving up for lack of progress. Often, being stubborn is a curse, sometimes it's a blessing. This time I did not give up and I've been trying anything to make the engine sound authentic. Analyzing the soundwaves from youtube onboard videos, manually drawing into the sound curves of my recordings, juxtaposing isolated loops of specific frequencies, shaping via volume envelope. And it's been a fascinating learning experience, and... every week I was getting closer. Sometimes it was just a seemingly crazy random idea that produced unexpected results but also, often those ideas that felt like it should solve the puzzle did not deliver at all. And then, three days ago, I finally stumbled on the missing piece, having learned through all that journey what keywords were substantial: "separating the tonal elements from the noise elements of the recording".

I'm not there yet, but very close indeed. All fingers, toes and tentacles crossed. So that's all I've been working on. Probably failed to list everything but these were the main tasks. Oh yeah, I found a way to have dynamic raindrops also on the side and rear window, without affecting performance. Once I'm done with the engine sound, I'll start preparing the v014 release. This means I'll also have to add a new camping ground close to the mine entrance to start from (there's already a rudimentary spot on a hill above it). So that's all for the dev side of things.

On a personal level, I guess mid-life came knocking on my door last year and I've gone through some mind transformations - one of them is shielding myself from the outside noise and algo-driven outrage inducing programming - and just concentrating on finishing BEWARE.

There was this thing last year where the unity suits had probably the most idiotic idea I've ever heard of - demanding fees % based on the number of installs of each game made with unity3d. Some decadence was to be expected since the company went public, but still it made me somewhat sad I had chosen that game engine. For the record, when I first downloaded unity v3 in late 2010 - it was still run by a bunch of passionate nerds from Denmark, who wanted to democratize game dev, or so they claimed.

Also, more often now, I remind myself that I should be thankful. For many things, and particularly for being to able to do what I love. I'm also wearing reading glasses now - my eyesight went downhill this last year. Nothing tragic though. So that's it - hope you're all OK! Here, everything is roughly 75% more expensive. I assume it's similar in your parts of the world, so hang in there and keep on trucking. Wishing you all the very best,

Ondrej