• The game now has its own site, where I’ll continue uploading screenshots and video. I’ll keep the Arges site mainly focused on the development and programming side of things.
• I’ve made an initial post on the Touch Arcade forums, and so far the comments have been very positive.
• There have been a series of previews published on IndieGameMagazine, AppAdvice and Gamezebo.
• Finally, you’ll find the latest trailer below:

It’s really exciting to see things so close to being released after working on it for so long.

Someone asked on the Unity forums how to implement a follow behavior. Here’s a quick example to go with my reply about a trivial implementation, where the cubes are all followers and the sphere only has a SteerForWander behavior.

I’d initially done that work directly on the AutonomousVehicle class, but changing how the speed and velocity are treated would have broken any implementations depending on the previous approach, like Boids. I have decided to split them in two classes, with AutonomousVehicle retaining the old way of doing things and Biped being the class for vehicles that can alter their velocity vector instead of just their speed (to, say, side-step).

This allows the AutonomousVehicles to take advantage of the improvements I have been doing in the past year, and bring a significant performance improvement. Both AutonomousVehicle and Biped (which is the one that interprets the velocity independent of the agent’s forward vector, for lack of a better name) now descend from a common TickedVehicle parent, and each one just handle speed and velocity in their own way.

On my tests I am now able to easily run 6-7 times the number of boids, and with some balancing I could see that easily going up to 10 times the previous amount. While I don’t plan to have over 4,000 boids running around on screen at the same time, it’s nice to know what UnitySteer now uses much less resources than before.

While working on this, I’ve also re-done SteerForSphericalObstacleAvoidance. The key differences from the previous approach are:

• I no longer use the old Obstacle descriptor, which expected obstacles to remain in a single place once they had been detected.
• Every obstacle is expected to be a DetectableObject. You can just use helper behavior DetectableObjectCreator, which will create the detectable object component for a game object on start depending on its collider boundaries.
• I’ve fixed an old, silly bug on my implementation of Paul Bourke’s line-sphere intersection calculations.

This is a work in progress and most of my testing has been focused on bipeds, since it’s what we’re using on Hairy Tales, but it will make it easier for people looking to experiment with the development branch if they still want to use the old style autonomous vehicles. At this point, if you’re thinking of using UnitySteer I would actually suggest that you look into the development branch instead of master. I plan to have a full release once the game is out and I get a breather to document it, but the codebase will be close to its current state.

One of the recent improvements is that as you cleanse a stage of corruption, the background begins lightening from a night sky to a daylight scene.

Alongside this, I’ve also changed how corruption spreads: it’ll now go infecting tiles one by one, instead of the more gradual spread you saw on the past alphas.

We’ve also added several new stage elements to the puzzles. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but here’s one of them:

These are wind-ups which will automatically turn a tile every 5 seconds, adding an element of timing to the scenes (and also altering tiles the player can’t modify himself, like the stone arrows).

And finally, we’re getting the game’s main bosses integrated. I’m very happy with how they’re coming out:

I’ll have a video including that big guy out soon.

On top of having a few different stages for those of you who already played Alpha 1, it also has these major changes:

• All scenes now have the mushroom scoring pick ups, which were present only on some scenes before. Quite a few are off the beaten path to encourage the player to try alternate paths.
• A proper user interface. The tip at the bottom is likely to go away once I integrate the tutorials.
• You now have a limited number of lives per level.
• It’ll show your score, corruption percentage cleaned and other values at the end of each level.
• Progress tracking, which will be displayed in the stage loader.
• New visual hints on elements that redirect a character, like cannons and fences.
• We have removed all of the placeholder visual effects, polished the music themes, improved camera zoom, added new sound effects and a whole host of other small changes.

Drop by Twitter and tell us what you think!

New closed gate effect…

… as well as an open variant:

We realized we needed better indicators on which way the characters will run when they encounter a scene element, particularly on busy scenes, so we’ve added some arrows to those elements that will alter their direction:

There’s also some new effects on the teleporter well, including a nice satisfying splash when the characters enter it,

This coming week we’ll replace the in-stage user interface for something cleaner, as well as add the final particle effects instead of some of the placeholders.

Here’s a sample of how the first scene looked on the alpha 1 I released last week:

And this is how it looks now:

Not only I like the subtle changes in tone better, but by virtue of it being mostly unlit (except for shadows) it is much faster than before, which will be a boon to get this running on devices with a slower GPU like the iPad. Two more examples:

Old:

New:

Old:

New:

You’ll notice we also got a new model for the obstacles, to make the scenes look cleaner, plus some new tiles for the whole stage.

This is really shaping up.

Update: We have concluded the first round of public alpha testing. Send us an e-mail if you’re like us to notify you of future releases!

You’ll notice it’s very light on explanations, other than a 1-liner tip on the top left. That’s intentional. I want to hear how understandable the concepts are, and how well they come across from the stage behavior.

It contains 11 stages from the game, showing some of the gameplay elements and should give you a good idea of what the stages are like. There is no completion screen yet, so once you’re done with a stage, just move onto the next one.

It’s very much a work in progress and still contains some placeholder elements and missing effects, but the gameplay is there. We’d love to hear what you think.

Which will have its own elements, challenges, and end boss:

We’re of course also adding its own type of trees and vegetations to be corrupted:

You can see our video previews here.

Update: We’ve finally settled on the tone for the corrupted tiles on the mountain levels.

And since I forgot to add them last week to the site, here are the power ups in their “natural environment” (but still lacking particle effects):

You may also want to head over to reddit for an on-going discussion and more sample images.

In the game, you help those little guys get cleanse the world of corruption by finding the pieces of the Alatuir stone and using it to cleanse the stages. They’re well-meaning but not very sharp, so you’ll need to lead them to avoid hazards, evil creatures and other dangers, while using contraptions scattered around.

We still need to add proper particle effects plus some sounds, so it’s very much a work in progress, but we’ll have an updated video soon.

More details along with a video later.

What they used to look like:

While we liked the previous versions by themselves, once we put them in the stage with all the other elements they tended to be too visually busy, and tended to draw the player’s attention away from the stage.

And here they are, already animated in-game:

The model:

We have also added bases to the hexes, to change a bit the sort of floating look that we previously had.

Mr. HintFish, ready for his close up:

Neutral good guys you can rescue:

And of course the baddies will sometimes block your way: