Hello, my name is Sterling and I’m the creator of The Forbidden Arts. I’m not a one-man team on this game, but I write the code, design the game and manage it all so it’s definitely my baby. The Forbidden Arts is an Action-Platformer game with a heavy focus on discovery and exploration. Players will assume the role of Phoenix, a young Pyromancer who embarks on a journey to understand his inner flame. Phoenix can manipulate fire and will learn to control the element and harness its power. Players will journey through a rich and vibrant fantasy world full of mystery, danger, and unforgettable experiences as they attempt to stop the blight of a powerful Necromancer and save a world on the brink of destruction.
We’ve been working on the game for 2 1/2 years now and estimate 1 year left in development. The game is obviously being developed in Unity and we are planning to release on PC, Nintendo Switch, Ps4 and XBox One, with PC coming first. The game is still in a pre-alpha development stage but we just finished a demo of the game and recorded a video of it in action as can be seen below:
Our 2017 Video Trailer for the game can be seen here:
Below are links to our Website/Blog and Social Media sites. Feel free to check out more of the game. We will continue to post significant development updates to our Unity thread as well. We would love to hear from you so please reach out with any questions, comments etc. Thanks for checking out The Forbidden Arts!
Looking good so far for pre-alpha. There is still a lot of work to do in regards to subtle areas of polish and I’m sure you are still going to do an overall lighting treatment as well.
What stood out to me mostly is the rough animations in particular some of the player character transitions and most of the larger enemies. I’m not fond of the character running pose with his knives out wide especially in the overworld where the camera is behind him, but there is still ample time to find a better cycle. Still work to be done in the animations and in all the textures, of course, they are very tiled and repeating.
In the trailer it looked like the Pheonix and the enemies with the spears were not using root motion due to the foot slippage, although it was less evident in the game play through.
Keep at it -
Awesome feedback. Love it! Indeed yes there is still a bit of polish to do. In some of the scenes we’ve spent a bit more time on lighting, but the demo scene for instance, not so much. It’s just a few directional lights and we use the standard shader. I’m doing my best to keep the project moving forward, and the more graphical details I do plan to get to, but probably won’t be for a few more months. In any case, your feedback is completely understood and appreciated.
I never really thought about the run animation on the world map. I could have a more standard run animation applied to the character. It probably would make more sense now that I think about it.
The characters are using root motion, but the slippage you saw in the trailer was actually a mistake. The characters were moving in FixedUpdate instead of Update but no physics call was being made because in the video we just moved them w/ Translate instead. So it was actually a camera issue not rendering smoothly b/c the camera was set to Update(). That has been long since fixed.
Appreciate the feedback. theANMATOR2b, If you have a link to any projects you are or have worked on feel free to share as well. We’d love to check others out. New to these forums.
Indeed yes there is still a bit of polish to do. In some of the scenes we’ve spent a bit more time on lighting, but the demo scene for instance, not so much. It’s just a few directional lights and we use the standard shader. I’m doing my best to keep the project moving forward, and the more graphical details I do plan to get to, but probably won’t be for a few more months. In any case, your feedback is completely understood and appreciated.