Hi!

It's been a long while since the last devlog. True to the themes of Forgotten Fields' story, gathering momentum and and keeping work going at a steady pace can sometimes be really difficult, and - for me - if the core development work isn't flowing along at a quick pace, writing devlogs/ marketing etc becomes lower priority and falls by the wayside. 

But having kept up development through this slow period, I now have a foundation of the new bits and can sprint through the remainder of the game - because there isn't much left!

We're now at the final scene - Sid's house. Sid is back home for the party that we've been moving towards since the opening. Of course, if you'd rather see the house when the game is out, then maybe skip this devlog.

The design for the house is something I've had in my mind from the beginning. It isn't something I'd planned for any specific reason, it's just the place that I saw while imagining the game's story. 
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So first of all, here's a stop motion video of me building the house, set to classical music, because why not?

​With Sid's house (mostly) completed, the next step was to make the backdrop. While you can't really explore the neighborhood, it was important make the bits that are visible realistic and believable, in order to make the atmosphere feel cozy and lived in. I must admit, I got a bit more ambitious with this part than I'd planned. But I really loved creating the little neighborhood, and it was a great learning experience!
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Here's some pictures of the neighborhood under construction. This area is of course, also inspired by the kind of places you'd see in Goa, while also maintaining some of that Ghibli flavor I've tried to have in the game from the beginning:

I've tried to add as many details as possible - wires, AC units, pavements, gutter covers, transformers, water tankers, satellite dishes - things that really make the neighborhood identifiable as set in India/ South Asia. I may add some more if possible!
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After that, I went and got myself a plug in for the skies and the environmental/ ambient lighting system (Enviro Sky and Weather) which will help me change the time of the day during run time in this scene. It also pushes up the lighting quality up a notch! 

Finally, having finished up the neighborhood and lit it up with some Realtime GI lights, the next step was to focus on improving the performance. Of course, the final optimization run will be done once the game is fully finished content wise, but I also don't want the game to chug during testing!

One of the steps I took was to dynamically turn off unnecessary lights in the neighborhood when the player isn't present in that spot/ when the camera can't see it. I did this by simply switching the lights on/off using triggers. So when the player is in the house, the lights in the front and back streets are turned off (and replaced by a single light to keep it lit when in the background), when the player is in the front street, the lights in the house and the backstreet are turned off, etc - you get the point.
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Only, switching them on/off abruptly didn't look good, so I decided to fade the power of the lights in and out by animating the properties. This took a little time, but was totally worth it! The framerate improvement was also the same as switching the lights off. Check it out in the video below:

​That's it for this time! The next devlog will probably be when the game is almost finished. 
If you've got any thoughts/ feedback, I'd love to hear it - send me a mail or leave a comment! I'll see you guys in the next post :)


- Armaan

Hi!
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I've spent a lot of time working on the scene that the Forgotten Fields demo ends on - Ethan's house and the surrounding neighborhood area. A lot of that time has been spent on making this place feel atmospheric, warm and alive.

Fun backstory - the vibe of this place has been inspired by a random dead end road that my friends and I discovered after we got lost and took a wrong turn. It's a pretty basic spot, but it's also special - there are  fields on one side of the road, two railway tracks that run parallel to the road on the other side, and some old houses a little distance away on the third side. This place has become one of our favorite hang out spots ever, and so of course, I decided to add it to the game.

The spot in monsoons-

The focus of this post is on those previously mentioned trains, and how game dev is quite a bit like film making in that a lot of the things you see are actually illusions and magic. There's some weird stuff going on behind the scenes! If don't want to break immersion, maybe skip this post (or the last part of it) The trains are only set up as a part of the background to add atmosphere to the place and also as a reference to the place that has inspired this area in the game. You can't get on them!
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Now first of all, The trains are set up as "NPCs" (through the plugin Adventure Creator) which basically allows me to set up their back and forth movement on the tracks using AC's "paths" system. This helps me avoid having to animate the trains. The paths system also has the option to pause at every node, which means that the trains won't be running back and forth all the time and will instead pass by at more realistic time intervals. Simple, but nifty.

The blue boxes or bogies on one of those trains are the typical sort you see in Indian passenger trains, and are immediately recognizable to anyone that has traveled by or ever seen them. ​

Having got the movement sorted, the next most important part to figure out was the sound of the trains passing by. This sound should only play when the train is close to the player. 

​To make sure that the sounds stop after the train is out of earshot, I set up these triggers (the red boxes) on either side of the playable area to recognize the train and only then turn the sound component on. The sound turns off automatically once the audio clip ends (it's about 20 seconds long only) as it is not set to loop. The triggers (also a part of AC) are set up to recognize if the sound is already playing, so that they don't launch the audio clip twice.

I think it sounds pretty good!
Another fun little thing going on behind the scenes that amused me is that the house that you see in the picture below falls right on top of the tracks. This house is only seen once, in the shot seen below, and it had to be placed on that spot to fill up the scene and make the world seem more realistic.

Thanks for reading, and see you in the next devlog! :)

​-Armaan

Hello!

A lot of progress has been made since the last devlog. I've spent the last week or so working on one of the most important exciting scenes of the game - the beach!

(Btw, I've saved the best part for the end of this post, so make sure to read till the end! BUT, skip it if you'd rather discover it yourself in the full game release :) )

Visuals

One of the things I love about making games is that you get to sculpt an immersive, beautiful world, and that once you get in the flow it almost becomes a spiritual experience. Sculpting the land and laying an ocean over it felt surreal. Check it out in this timelapse video of the process - 

For the water, I'm using the free, open source version of the Crest Ocean System, and the quality of this is excellent. I especially love the subsurface scattering effect that allows the waves to be illuminated by the sun, giving it that Assassin's Creed Black Flag or Sea of Thieves feel. One of the reasons why I love those games is the peaceful, beautiful atmosphere created by their oceans, so it's really exciting for me to have something of that sort.
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One of the things I was disappointed about is the shoreline waves - my scene is on the beach, not the ocean, so waves on the shore are pretty important. By default, the shoreline remains pretty static in Crests, with nothing more than foam on the edges.

Not being a programmer and knowing nothing about shaders, I tried to improvise a solution - I added a GerstnerPatch (from one of the example scenes in Crests) and tweaked the settings to ramp up the waves and make them sharper only near the shoreline. Another issue is that by default the shoreline remains static - in reality on a beach, the water runs up and then back down the beach pretty prominently. To fix that I animated my ocean "plane" to move slowly up and down. Here's a video showing the process - 

​Sound

Now I had the beach set up and looking pretty great visually, I was pretty excited for the next bit - sound. 
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Back when I was lacking inspiration and unsure of what I wanted this game to be about, a visit to Goa (my home) gave me that much needed spark of inspiration, and a visit to my favorite beach was one of the most impactful moments of that trip.  In that moment when I was floating in the water, I wished I could accurately share and experience how it actually feels to be floating in the ocean. And one of the most important aspect of this experience is the sound - the flappy sound that wet, bare feet make on wet sand, how the atmosphere sounds on the shore, how the waves crash when standing on the water's edge, how it changes when underwater, and how it suddenly breaks into a large, expansive sound as soon as you emerge from it.

For this I needed a more complex system than the one provided by default in Unity, as the default system only allows you to specify proximity to a sound source using spheres. The shoreline is a line, not a sphere, which meant I would have a mess of a 100 spheres everywhere denoting different zones. 

To fix this, I got myself the Volumetric Audio asset - This (among other features) allows you to specify a custom shape for your audio source. Perfect!

Here's a video that shows the different audio zones as set up in the scene - 

What do you think? There are 4 different zones set up playing sounds for 1) the wide, atmospheric sound of the overall ocean from a distance 2) the sound of waves crashing loudly when standing close them 3) underwater (heard in the next video) and 4) (my favorite) the wide, expansive sound you hear as soon as your ears pop when you come to the surface from underwater.
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Like I promised, I've saved the best for last - first person mode. As you would've seen in the demo, the game switches to first person from time to time. Making this scene playable in first person was super important for me to create that immersion and the accurate feeling of being in the beach that I mentioned above.

​With this, you're actually able to feel the movement of the water, the waves constantly crashing over your face, the constant change in sound as your head bobs under and over water, the sound of the wind on the shore, and wet feet on sand. Check it out -

​Of course, some of the sounds still need a little tweaking and polishing. I think the first person video above really captures what I dreamed of creating and sharing that day on the beach, and I'm super excited about it :)
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See you next time!

-Armaan

​Hi!

Welcome to the first devlog for Forgotten Fields! During the development of Rainswept, I kept quite a regular and detailed record of development through posts like these (24 of them!) and they were great not only for sharing information about my development process, but were also a great way of arranging my own thoughts about the game and feelings about the game's development. Kind of like a journal. 

Development of this game has been quite different from that of Rainswept in many ways, and the lack of devlogs this time is one of them. I've just had my mind completely on making the game, and haven't had the time and energy for the other important bits like sharing progress on social media and here, through devlogs. Being only a handful of months away from release, we may not get more than a half dozen posts out, but something is better than nothing!

After wrapping up a successful Kickstarter campaign​, I've hunkered down and put myself completely into making progress with the game. At the end of the demo, Sid reaches his friend Ethan's house - he's supposed to pick up some papers here, for his childhood home that's about to be sold off.

This area is much bigger than the previous two scenes, and is one where I feel like the game really shines. There's a few "quests", some interesting gameplay, and some warm, peaceful areas to explore outside Ethan's house as Sid waits for the paperwork to be finished.

But more importantly, you can pet the dog -

Hey everyone!

Just an update to let you guys know that new things are being worked on, and that there should be more news in the coming weeks and months. For one, I've already updated the website to which now reads www.frostwoodinteractive.com instead of www.rainsweptgame.com (the old link forwards to the new one) The website now reflects the studio's work as a whole, with Rainswept being a sub section.

I'm also hoping to start some work on creating videos (devlogs and other stuff) and I'll be giving it a shot in the next few days/ weeks. Keep an eye out here - Youtube channel

And of course, I'm in the business of making video games, so that'll always be the main talking point! If there's anything new at all ( ;) ) then it's in extremely early, baby stages. But it'll be exciting, and I'll talk about it soon.

Until next time!

Armaan