Neon - pre Alpha PC Game - Created in Unity Basic. Now on Steam Greenlight.

Community Showcases
1

Hi all,

Let’s start with some pics to give you an idea what Neon is… (The latest pics are in reply not this OP)

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… and a 1080p YouTube video: (this is now graphically out of date but will give a good idea of the combat):

Neon’s Concept
In short the goal is to create the next great hardcore 6DOF shooter for a generation of gamers who have been left out in the cold in recent years.

Neon is a Descent-like/Quake-like spaceship combat game with Diabloesque loot explosions and 80 levels of ship upgrading.

The game is currently built with Unity Basic. I plan to purchase and upgrade the game to Unity Pro if there is enough interest for me to consider the upgrade viable. As a single guy working full time on the project my cashflow is very low. I don’t want to invest $1000 if there is not enough interest in the game for it to make sense. I hope you can understand.

Steam Greenlight page:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=111075014

A extremely detailed explanation of the game can be seen on the Greenlight page (as it is currently serving as the homepage for Neon) along with loads more pics and hours of gameplay videos.

Let me know what you think, your comments, criticism, advice, and feedback are all welcome and appreciated.

I look forward to hearing your comments.

Paul

2

Looks good, specially for a one man attempt in the Unity Basic version. A very Tron like look, that is definitely appealing, eager to see how it takes shape. Congrats! and you have my vote!

3

Nice, like the art style too. Good luck with it.

4

Wow, this looks really cool! Best of luck to you and the game.

5

It looks amazing and 1 man in basic? Extravagant! Without playing it I would say it is pretty good looking keep it up :slight_smile:

6

Thanks for the response guys.

It was a nervous time there for a while. I’d spent a year on that bad boy without showing anyone until last Saturday.

Well, I did show some non gamer type friends some early prototypes but obviously they had no idea what I had in my head for it and it was kind of discouraging see their ‘whatever’ attitude towards it back then.

The response so far has been almost all positive so I have a sense of relief that I didn’t waste all that time.

If anyone is interested in following it’s progress I started a developers log on the greenlight page.

Thanks again for your support. It means a lot.

7

If something will be sold, I do not care if it’s done by a child, a single person, or a huge monolithic entity - it has to stand up. Thankfully, your game does look very cool - I like the descent vibe and I forgot how much fun it was. Good luck with the game. Just don’t think anyone is going to give you a break because you’re one man (if you’re selling stuff) :slight_smile:

I think it’ll look substantially better in unity pro (everything can glow, you can have depth of field and all the deferred lighting goodness) so if you can scrounge the cash together it may be a cool option?

8

Yeah, the lack of glow is a shame in Unity Basic. I do have every intention of buying Unity Pro in the future unless for some strange reason I have to cancel the project.

For now though the basic framework is way more than enough to build the entire gameplay systems. Sometimes doing things yourself makes thing more predictable and in the long run easier.

Like I had to come up with my own pathfinding solution and occlussion culling tech but I’m happy I did because it’s utterly flexible now and I can add any feature I want to it without having to wade through someone else’s code. I’m sure I’d have a bit of a battle on my hands trying to do either of those using the features in Unity 4 because my gameworld is randomly generated and different each game.

Thanks for the feedback though hippocoder.

BTW: I’ve started a Developer Diary on the greenlight page if any of you dev’s want to follow the more techy side of Neon’s progress.

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The last couple of weeks were spent doing a big overhaul of the user interface. The majority of the placeholder stuff is now gone.

It was quite a big job getting it all working with Unity’s basic GUI stuff especially the pop out windows that kept bugging out on me due to the weirdness of me registering the mouse hovering over a GUI.Layout item, then trying to draw a window with GUI.Layout elements afterwards. Unity was not happy to do that at all. Anyway, there are 10 new screenshots of the new interface mixed into the screenshots here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=111075014

Better?

10

hey man any insight on how you did the HUD on the free Unity? looks great congrats!

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looking nice so far =)
I’d offer helping you out in unity pro, sadly i think there’s still the license restriction that one can’t do projects where some have unity pro and others unity free, no?
Anyway, keep it up =)

12

Thanks for the encouraging comments.

@ dudeabot : Was there a specific part of the HUD you were interested in?
I find Unity’s GUI to be very flexible with what is possible. It doesn’t make life easy for sure, but it does give all the building blocks needed to create just about anything. It simply takes lots of coding to get it all working.

@ ugur : I’m not sure on that restriction but I would assume you are correct. As soon as I feel sure that Neon will be a success I will upgrade to Unity Pro.

Incidentally, Neon’s graphics changed significantly this week, so it’s worth having another look at the greenlight page to check out the new screenshots.

If Neon got any negative feedback it was almost always to do with the colours in the game - too dark - too similar everywhere - too hard to see enemy ships etc.

I took that feedback on board and spent some time coming up with different designs. This resulted in a new colour scheme system. The game currently has eight colour schemes that the player can choose from. Another system was added to dynamically change the colour of the environment dependant on whether the area was controlled by a friendly faction or a hostile one. This adds more variety to the look of the world.

Another system was colour changes on events. An example of this is that when the player takes damage the whole environment changes colour to a deep red and fades back to normal colours over half a second. I can use this system to make the whole world change colour whenever I want so that should add some extra variety as time goes on.

The colour of ships also now change depending on whether they are friendly or hostile to the player. Green for friendly, red for hostile.

Previously all ships were red lines on a black surface and they could disappear into the black background. I added an option to swap the texture on ships to basically invert them to black lines on a red background, or black lines on a green background. White was also added into their textures for a little extra variety.

So to conclude, the player can now choose how the game looks. If they don’t like the default look they can swap to another drastically different colour scheme, and if they have trouble seeing the ships they can invert the colour scheme on those between default and high visibility textures.

Oh and I did a quick remodel of the cockpit. It’s still a placeholder but it’s significantly better than the original 5 minute rush job that is seen in the video. Check the screenshots to see how even this quick remodel is a big improvement.

If anyone has any questions or feedback, I try my best to build a relationship with those who are interested in the game so go for it.

The greenlight page is full of discussions and information that is not immediately obvious on the front page. . Take a look in the ‘Feedback Needed :)’ announcement thread and the ‘Chat with the Developer’ discussion to find lots of player feedback and chat about the game.

13

Seems interesting enough… Yep, the game is too dark; you should fix that. About the not so visible enemies: attach a GUI representation to each that should stay the same size from distance and they should be visible. Like a circle with their names or life bars. Anyway, you got my vote. Good luck! :wink:

14

Thanks for the vote but even more so your interest.

Hopefully the new colour schemes have aleady solved the problems for those who find the game too dark. We will get a better idea once the alpha testing starts in a couple of months.

15

Just some constructive criticism to help make your game succeed :slight_smile:

It looks like it has some good game mechanics, but visually, you need to bump up the quality of the textures, it looks like all the textures were stretched and very fuzzy, for example, the intro screen, the text is really low quality and fuzzy. If you increased the definition/quality on the textures it will look so much better, perhaps put in some glow?

16

Thanks for the criticism and ideas Spanda

Did you check out the latest screenshots? Many of the newer colour schemes have very crisp textures rather than the fuzzy ones you don’t like so much.

As for glow, that will have to wait as it’s not a feature in Unity Basic which I’m currently using.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas :slight_smile:

17

sorry i have not detailed at all

my question is how yuo applied the GUI to the cockpit, looks pretty neat, is it just the GUI being applied to a quad/plane?

18

Ah, the cockpit GUI is primarily 3D text objects and GUI.textures

The radar is an old and heavily modified version of some Radar tech created by ForceX. It can be found here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/79163-3D-Radar

If I had Unity Pro I could probably create it all and convert it to a texture that can be drawn onto the cockpit but that option is not available in Unity Basic.

19

I managed to properly overload Unity in not one but two ways this week and I thought some of you guys may be interested in the story.

Imagine Neon’s game world for a moment : 800-1500 spaceships all flying around in the same game level at the same time. Each one has an AudioSource component (for the sound of it’s engines when it flies by). Now Unity obviously has a max distance setting on the AudioSource component, so it ignores them if they are far away. But it means that Unity is constantly monitoring all AudioSource’s and turning them on and off.

This was already causing me a headache where sound effects would ‘Pop’ randomly. I now know that was because Unity was struggling to prioritise all the AudioSources in the game.

This week I added about another 400 AudioSources to my game for enviromental sounds. The game has fans on the walls everywhere. Over the entire level there are probably 100 fans. I added AudioSources to each one along with a bunch of other similar things.

The result? Unity’s audio system went tit’s up. Sounds that were meant to be 3D were turning 2D and playing constantly when the player was no where near them. My speakers were popping almost constantly as Unity struggled to prioritise which AudioSources should be playing (I assume) then switching AudioSources off mid clip.

I had to develop a completely new system. I removed all the AudioSource components in the game and created a new way to handle AudioSources.

I created a little script called AudioSauce. I pop one of these on any object that I want to play a sound.

The AudioSauce script basically stores what audioclip to play, at what volume, whether it loops, it’s maximum distance etc. It also creates a small sphere collider on the object.

The player’s ship then has a big sphere collider. If the player comes within range of an AudioSauce script, OnTriggerEnter fires on the AudioSauce script and an empty game object with an AudioSource component is moved to that location and plays the sound. (Most of these sounds loop). Once the player moves out of range the AudioSource object is deactivated and waits until another object needs it.

So instead of having 1000+ AudioSources in the game, it now reuses the same 20-30 AudioSources and they jump around the game world to wherever they are needed near the player.

I said I overloaded Unity in two ways. Well, adding over 1000 new colliders to all those objects then caused the physics system to go funky and lag like crazy. Obvious really. Luckily all the ships in the game already had colliders that were optimised to turn off when out of range of the player so tweaking the AudioSauce code to reuse those colliders wasn’t too hard.

I hope this info is useful to some of you guys making similar games with as many in game objects. Then again, maybe I reinvented the wheel and Unity could handle this in a different way. I’ve only been using Unity for a year so it wouldn’t surprise me. Let me know if there is a built-in solution that I didn’t know about.

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If any of your are interested I will be streaming some live playtesting of Neon on Twitch.tv starting in about an hour. That would be Jan 21st at about 20:30 GMT.

You can watch the stream or videos by following this link:

I hope to see one or two of you there. :slight_smile: