Oberon's Court mobile fantasy RTS art-dump

muppetpuppet

Hi everyone,
This my introduction, Applied game developer by trade, modder and indie gamedev by night.

Currently I'm working on a fantasy/afterlife themed RTS Oberon's court. My schtick for this project is to do it without any textures what so ever, only shaders and geometry. I've internally debated not doing any real-time shadows and postfx, but i've got a softspot for these, so that's allowed in my book.

Production's about 60% with the core systems done or nearly finished within a month or so. After that its Campaign creation,testing and a december release on as many platforms as possible (android fanboy, IOS also, and PC if it gets greenlit).
I'm doing all the modelling, shader coding, gameplay coding and animation solo, so its a bit of a labour of love, and not yet done;)

here's the indiedb link: http://www.indiedb.com/games/oberons-court
GReenlight concept page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=109049174

Here's the old teaser trailer,(bit dated but still)
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpRPEvaBZus"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpRPEvaBZus[/ame]

And here's the art-dump, containing render-tests, beautyshots, concept artwork and finally ingame screens from the latest android build..

concept art:


creatures:

hexes:


shader and realtime render-tests:





ingame screens (slightly out of date build, incomplete interface):









latest build, mobile optmized beauty shot:


I hope it hits a chord, I've always got plenty of design questions and prototypes up for brutal judgment, be happy to share those as time progresses..

for more videos. check my youtube channel or facebook
http://www.youtube.com/user/dummy36923/videos
http://www.facebook.com/oberonscourt


Cheers
Tomas Sala,

Deathstick

Heh I saw this before and I liked how the style works for the monsters/characters. The only thing that really bothers me is that I kind of wish there was atleast one more texture blended in the terrain to help establish a ground versus the mountains.

Right now it feels a bit too uniform texture-wise for the terrain.

SuperDuty455

I'm usually not a big fan of cartoonish visuals but I love the style here

ae.

love the style!

muppetpuppet

Thanks, I'm thinking about adding a sine deformed extra blend on the floors,to simulate just what you propose, an extra sharp division between mountains an floors.. But the ground shader is already sucking down most perfomance, and I might sacrifice any further complexity there to keep the game rolling at 60 fps on high-end devices (doin bout 80 fps on my nexu 7 (2013))

AimBiZ

Love the art style! If I have to crit anything it would be that the animations feels a bit floaty, or maybe they're not quite synced to the speed of which the units move.
Anyway, very impressive, solid art direction.
I'm very curious of how you've built the assets and shaders to achieve the look. If I didn't know better I'd thought you used some sort of color map for the terrain. Is the color determined by height, or is there some vertex coloring involved?
Keep the real-time shadows. They add a lot of character, not to mention readability.

muppetpuppet

@AimBiz

They're a bit floaty because they're also floating a bit, the pathfinding is also a sacrfice to performance,so no navmeshes, but oldskool point to point nodal pathfinding, so the nodes are stuck at intervals to the surface, so there's some interpolation, and zero physics or characters being stuck to the geometry . And you'r right I haven't perfected the speed/animation speed syncing yet. Both points are going to be fixed before release, but the amount of nodes is proportional to the perfomance, so waiting untill I know what bandwith I have left..


Regarding the shader, Its a bunch of effects, A heightmapped color gradient, (based of the UVcoords and some bounds), Some fresnel effects,(clamped to another gradient, offset to the color), then a Vertex Color baked from radiosity multiplied at a few stages of the shader.
Also all the smoothing groups are manually applied and cut-up, to keep both smooth gradients and sharp edges in unity3d.

I've got a couple of options turned off now for perfomance, including a face normal dependent gradient, xo color A on flatter surfaces blending to Color B on sharper vertical faces.Then Multiplied with a Desaturated Normal coloration. Its what you see in some of the first render tests.Everything also becomes a bit higher contrast and standout as well.

I'm contemplating releasing a special "Full Glory" Edition (HD is uselesss, as no textures or 2D interface means its always running native Res out of the box). This would contain the heavier shaders, hires shadows, Anti-aliasing etc etc, just for High -end tablets like my nexus 7 II. I would love a settings panel, but Unity doesn't allow switching on some features at runtime.

AimBiZ

Thanks for sharing. It's quite fascinating what one can do by sampling all the different types of data that comes with the mesh.

muppetpuppet

If you want the shader code just let me know,,

muppetpuppet

Some more new visuals,