It has been a busy couple of weeks working on EVA Infinity and I am excited to update people on the progress. The past two weeks have been about cleaning up details.
First, the ‘programmer artwork’ for the level loading bar has been replaced with a more polished progress bar.
More importantly, the throw animations have been fixed. The only means of thrust in the game is to throw objects. There were problems with the throw animation which made it hard to understand what was happening. The thrown objects would not be released at the correct moment, the objects moved too quickly and were too small. I fixed all of these and was immediately surprised how much better the game felt.
The last week has been spent experimenting with Nebulas. It is surprisingly difficult generating nice looking Nebulas. My first experiments used a particle simulation and forces to generate a tornado, and convert it to a mesh. It looked fantastic in Blender with a subsurface scattering shader, but sadly there was no way to bring it into Unity with reasonable performance.
The solution that worked was to create layers of transparent surfaces at different depths with custom lightmaps and masks. Animating these different layers gives a wonderful effect. I am still looking for a way to have the nebulas interact with lighting.
The next goals will be to put a beta test together.