BGMC 22 | UnderTow [Winning Entry]

Here is mine and Grenzer’s entry into BGMC 22 :smiley:

We built it with blender 2.75 so you will need this version (crashes with 2.78a because of mirror.py)
I will upload a standalone version as well.

Updated:

Game .blend collection v1.2
Start with ‘MainMenu.blend’

Standalone v1.2: Here

Full Playthrough (20 minutes)

preview image:


Future considerations: porting to UPBGE for better performance.

Hope you all like it! :smiley:

Win64 8.1 error - wrong path to files and textures!

Thanks, just noticed this problem. I think I did some accidental saving over the fixed file again…
will try add a fix asap.

Ok turns out I accidently saved an old file ontop of the the new one just before exporting, therefore all external media paths were wrong.
I have added v1.1 of the .blends and v1.1 standalone, with the external paths updated.
hope you guys can play it!

So turns out that all files had dependency issues, so I managed to relocate all the sound and image files, hopefully now it will all work.

Status: Updated v1.2 links in description.

The standalone player seems to be more stable (and is only about 70mb) so its probably easiest to just download this, extract it and open BGMC22 undertow.exe.

Added full 20 minute playthrough

I watched the play through and that looks fantastic. Great job

I died a lot of times… You forgot a mirror modifier. Why such small texture size, could’ve used an atlas texture for the repeated ones. The game runs smooth, but i dont understand, why vsinc is on? It runs under Upbge. :slight_smile: Also there is some error message in the console.

Great game!

Although the textures were great I think you can improve them through the use of a detail map.

Here’s an example:


The detail map is a small noisy normal map. It helps to break up the pixelated edges of your main normal map.
Apply it using UV co-ordinates but mapped to something like *12.0.
This is an easy way to make your textures appear much more detailed than they are without much drain on resources.

The detail doesn’t have to be so rough, you can set it to have very little influence and it will still have a visual effect. you can also use softer or smoother noise. You can even use a mask so it only shows up on certain materials, leaving very shiny ones smooth and perfect.

Thanks! Looking forward to getting around to playing your game too :smiley:

Hmm, yes good point, for many objects we could have just used a mirror modifier to reduce the texture size.
I think at the end we were really struggling to keep it within 30mb (which was the limit) we ended up with around 39mb even after reducing sound + texture quality, but yes an atlas would have been a good idea! Unfortunately we ran out of time before we could really look into properly optimizing the game.
Great :smiley: its nice to hear that it runs well! I think we left vsync on because it was the default setting, and we were rushing in the last minute to get all the levels done.

The error message might have something to do with saving the game between levels or when the overlay scene is removed, eitherway it shouldn’t break the game (hopefully) but it would be something to fix next time!

This is great!! Originally Grenzer had built most of the level without normal maps, so I felt generating them would take up too much time, but using your method as you explain here would be very useful to make the materials look more realistic, and would especially help with the low resolution problem.

I will definitely keep a note of this for the future!

Heh, I was at first using the RGB diffuse texture as a normal map…which is terrible for performance but at least get’s the job done. That’s an interesting idea though, I remember I once used a similar method for snow, using a large normal map for the big snow texture and grain noise for individual flakes of snow on the ground. It sounds odd but it worked well for the game. I’ll have to keep detail mapping in mind for games I make in the future.
thanks for the feedback and advice! :slight_smile:

Main menu textures are missing. If you can get a fixed version in the next few hours I’ll put it in the all-games pack.
Some textures from the second level are also missing.

Is this for the standalone or .blend pack?

BLEND VERSION. May be there, but if so they need to be made relative.

edit: sorry, blend version

Ok,well the standalone is pretty much a working blend version just with an executable and extra’s placed on-top so you could delete the .exe and other files and it will be identical.
Was busy for most of today but I’m uploading an updated .blend version now.

Note:
2.78 does not work due to a crash caused by mirror.py so 2.75 is recommended although other versions (2.77/2.76) should also work.

Updated Link

This is a really great game. Especially for a BGMC. The only things that I can really pick out, are the textures. (specifically the elevator doors) and the voices. The voices sound too robotic in my opinion. Maybe that’s what you were going for but I think that getting people to do the lines could make it much better. Still it is a great games and I love the visuals!

Thanks for the feedback and play through! I really like your YouTube channel too, I watch all of your play thoughs every BGMC. :slight_smile:
Youre right about the robotic voices - they weren’t human at all actually! I used a text to speech program for all of the lines because I didn’t have anyone who could voice act. One of my friends was going to do it, but my mike was so bad I just ended up using TTS anyway.

Great playthrough!
Unfortunately you must have played v1.1, I hadn’t got around to fully fixing all the bugs (like the stairs, missing sounds, missing textures etc).

But hopefully the rest of the experience wasn’t too bad :D.