Unoffensible is a casual RTS made to be played with VR controllers and impossible to play with a mouse.
Towering over the battlefield you will physically interact with everything. You will have full freedom to slowly buildup a powerful army or quickly strike the enemy at a weak point. Unlock upgrades and discover new allies. A RTS like this is impossible without VR.
There is a free Demo/Playtest available on steam. There is still a lot of work to do. Updates will be made regularly until the full vertical slice is completed.
Player feedback is much welcomed, here or on the steam community hub.
Steam Page:
For the steam VR fest I intended to push a graphics update right before the fest started 
Like a true professional I missed the deadline. (this is version 0.0.29)
With URP DOTS you are allowed 1 realtime directional camera, no other realtime lighting. With the terrains the shadows are very drawcally. And Mixed lighting is not working at all. So with this update I paint the terrain with ‘shadow textures’ in the places where shadow is baked. ‘Shadow textures’ have more roughness and less normal strength so the realtime light is less visible on them. Now setting the terrain to not cast shadows saves half the terrain draw calls. And realtime shadows on dynamic objects return + specular light on lit terrain (gives a lot more depth).
Dynamic shadow and baked shadow overlap is still an issue, but will revisit that later.
Here is a before and after image :
The sand level is my favorite, with the sun at 1 degree angle, the shadows are huge. In the bottom right you can see the effect of the ‘Shadow texture’, the realtime light is not visible while the terrain is not casting shadows.
Just bought a pico 4. And streaming from PC (steamVR) everything worked out of the box with openXR. Pleasantly surprised.
I will be focusing on improving the games graphics a bit. Most of the gameplay systems are in a good enough state that I believe they can be improved to the final version without creating new challenges.
But wishlist count is still low, and with the steampage being the primary place I show my game… I guess better trailer/screenshots/capsules are needed.
I initially thought I could make the gameplay fun first and do the visuals later, but after adding the explosion lights the game was so much more satisfying to play. Doing the graphics update before re-recording a trailer just makes a lot of sense.
This is a blender-render, but in the game the amount of green illuminated surface is directly related to the amount of damage using shadergraph + material property.
Before updating to DOTS 1.0 the progress made on the visuals should be seen in the trailer and the screenshots. Marketing is definitely the weak point currently, with only just breaking the 100 wishlist mark.
Updated all the capsules on the steampage, got to love all the different dimensions :-). Love the vertical one, but I guess no one will ever see it… since “These can appear at the top of the front page during seasonal sales, and on other new sale pages.”
So here for your eyes only 
So just tweaked the location and color of the logo. It now matches the color of the tabel + humanoid.
Not sure if it is better for standing out in the steam store, but as a poster on my wall I would rather have the logo dimmer. Maybe I’ll do an slightly brighter logo as an in between option… First I need to update some more marketing material to this version… then I guess I need to work on the game it self again :-).
Visibility of the game is still a big problem. There is a very low clickthrough rate on the capsules. Hopefully I can replace them all before steam strategy fest starts next week. To improve my changes overall the screenshots and trailer also needed an update to the latest version.
Since the old trailer is already old (from December 2022) it is much easier to see it is too long and the starting seconds are very ‘meh’.
With the new version I tried to make short sections for the main gameplay in the game. Should anyone skip through the trailer they are likely to hit completely different features. I could not find the right music for the game or for the trailer, but the voice over helps a little to clarify what the trailer is showing.
The 3rd person camera really helps with recording the gameplay while the player is in VR. With the previous trailers the VR view was used and it was really hard to show the throwing of objects. It is on the backlog to be included in the game. Its a huge performance hit, but will help for streaming in the future. If the visibility on steam was better I would probably not prioritize this, but as a ‘programmer art’ game screenshots are just never going viral. Making it look better while streaming hopefully helps. Although the visuals in VR are always nicer than the 2D trailer/screenshot can capture.
Here is the new trailer:
Well strategy fest was a big disaster. There was a lot more visibility, but the visits really stayed behind. There are also still just a hand full of people that have played the demo, while it is currently in a very playable state.
While the clickthrough rate is low, it makes no sense to improve the gameplay or audio. Even if it was the best game in the world no one would know. So I decided to once again do a pass on the visual quality of the game. On the one hand its so annoying that ‘the game’ has not changed for months now, since for me the gameplay is what I love about the game. On the other hand I take pride in not having feature creep now and focusing on the marketability of the game, every change I make now only needs to be rolled out over a small subset of the final game. This should be much more efficient than focusing on the marketing/visuals later.
Maybe the game is just not what people want, and this is just another change that will never matter. But from all the things I could do to improve the game this seems the most marketing linked.
Here is an image with roughly the same scene in the new and old visual style. I know the angle is slightly different, and the new style has some extra buildings in it. I basically added fog, increased the amount of light, reduced saturation and used a high poly terrain made with detailed stamps and other textures.
To improve the trailer I made a player avatar and used a second camera to give a better idea about what the player is doing during gameplay. For a VR game the first person view on the monitor does not really give the same amount of information compared to playing the game in VR.
