He’s even visible in the trailer and banner on the Steam store page and in a lot of the promotional material:
Seems extremely lazy to me, especially coming from such a successful game development studio. He’s even standing in the default t-pose in most of the game.
I know you never see anything clearly in the game except for certain objects I won’t spoil, but it’s still so evident he doesn’t belong. His spiky hair and sci-fi clothing look so out of place, not to mention the t-pose, lol. Using the default 3ds Max biped with some cylinders skinned to it would be better in my opinion, at least he wouldn’t look so out of place.
I just needed to vent a little. I came across this game randomly on Steam and it looked super cool and I was looking forward to playing it. I consider walking simulators like Layers of Fear or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (not related to our Ethan :p) to be fantastic games, but Scanner Sombre is just a cool mechanic and barely an attempt at making a game around it.
Anyone else played it? What did you think? I feel like with just a bit more effort there could have been a really good game here.
Also, anyone have any idea how they may have done the main mechanic? The particles in the game never disappear and you can see every single one of them at once. There’s surely dozens of millions of particles on the screen at times, if not hundreds of millions or even billions. You can “paint” with the LIDAR for as long as you want anywhere in the game and the particles will never go away, even when you’re at the end you can see the first particles you placed. The framerate was all over the place to be honest, but most of the time it was smooth 60 fps.
Yep, pretty much. I wrote basically the same thing in my Steam review.
I sort of agree with him that it’s cool that they take risks like this, but I don’t think they took a big risk with this game, I can’t imagine it took very long to make, at least I hope not. It felt like someone’s fun little side project, but sadly also a bit like someone’s first game.
Lol
Edit: But I just want to say that I don’t feel ripped off. Seeing the mechanic first hand and playing around with it was neat, and they have mainly positive reviews on Steam. I’m just a bit disappointed, and Ethan showing up just annoyed me, lol. He’s just so easily identifiable from his silhouette.
I know this is kind of an old thread, but I was just watching Jacksepticeye play it, and when (spoilers ahead) the dude was standing in the middle of that temple thing, I was like “That’s the Ethan model from Unity!!”.
It was so distinguishable with that same t-pose and that spiky hair.
One thing you can try is use vertex colours. Alter mesh vertex colours. The clever part comes from using a shader to mask the texture so it looks like little round blobs instead.
I guess there’s a lot of ways to do this and it’s not really important as a secret or rendering challenge. People wanting a quick thing can just use Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making - it’s fun and free.
And, anyway, Ethan always dreamed of being more than a washed up prefab, usually without texture, abandoned without care to rotting github repositories and outdated standard assets.
Now Ethan is a star. His arms are proudly outstretched, as if blessing all that may come with his greatness.
