Red Paint, Panels, and Pipes

Lukas “Gås” Rabhi Hallner

He is Lukas

Hello, it is me — Lukas!!

You may remember me from films such as I am the Pipe Lord! and I Love Houdini. This week, apart from being ill for a while, I’ve modelled some rather snazzy modular red cabins. We will use these throughout the game to create interesting little houses of all shapes, sizes, and colours (although primarily Falu Rödfärg).

I’ve made a few hero assets, such as the control tower for the piston chamber, as well as a procedural cloth simulation tool using Houdini Engine, which will allow us to drape pretty much whatever we want in baked, high-quality simulated cloth.

In addition to this, I’ve made a system which gives some love to the main heroes of our game: the control panels! It is now possible to generate interesting, procedural panel shapes using simple masks, while allowing us to shape the panel after the buttons and controls.

I am definitely Lukas.*

*) Content not written by Lukas.

Modular Houses

Boards on the outside, wallpaper on the inside. Using modular 1x1m tiles, we can create houses of any shape we want, when combined with instanced roof tiles and a few seam-hiding pieces like gutters.

Modular Panels

A new tool allows us to quickly generate interesting control panel designs.

Fredrik “Smörgås” Lind

This Week I am the Pipe Lord

What a week!

While the first half of this sprint saw me focusing primarily on little fixes and quality-of-life improvements (icons, interact highlighting), as well as a few tools for creating variation in walls — the second half was spent improving the simulation systems of our Machines significantly.

Previously, a lot of the finer simulation aspects were — to put it bluntly — quite bodged. The system treated most “resources” the same, be it power or water running through a pipe. It was good enough for what we had, but never really allowed us to create puzzles with a sufficient sense of real-world attachment.

Well, no more!
Splitting our “resource” system into three parts (Power, Fluids, and Angular Kinetics) the new system for the most part follows the laws of physics. This means voltage, current, and resistance are accurately simulated across electrical systems; friction and momentum are simulated in gear linkages, while pressure and flow are simulated in fluid systems.

The new system has a multitude of advantages:

• A series-connected string of light bulbs will all go out if one of them does, without extra work from our part.
• A system of gears can be modelled, providing enough mechanical advantage from the motor inside an Air Conditioner to lift a car (albeit very slowly).
• A series of tanks can be connected, and the height difference between them will cause the fluid inside to flow in-between each-other realistically (did I hear fluid puzzles?).

While all of this has been “possible” previously, the new system makes it easy, and grounded in reality. A number of optimization features have been added to ensure all of this runs smoothly, primarily ensuring only a few machine parts are simulated per frame. In the future this might prove insufficient, in which case I’ll have to take another look at it.

I’m really looking forward to start designing puzzles with the New System™️, but for now I’ll have to fix what I broke doing this.

Pontus “Sparkles” Andersson

All Aboard the Audio Bus

I’ve worked on the previous piston audio and separated individual sounds across different parts of the actor, emphasizing its size.

I’ve also spent a lot of time on the audio controller, which can now interpolate audio from a room so it’s more prominent from openings like doors and windows. Reverb zones has also been created and placed in the rest of our game.

Simon “Vito” Gustavsson

The Grim Reaper Brings a Ladder

For this week I have been working on actions relating to the character and animating them.

For the first week i was focusing mainly on walking animations and on the second week a ladder functionality which is not yet done (darned transforms!).

I have also made it possible for the player to die 💀 and respawn 👼.

Simon “Boonga” Öhlund

Never Skips Leg Day

Well, this week was spent modelling The City (the walking city). This included work on the legs, and the carapace itself.

While under wraps for now, check out a few of the silhouette iterations below!*

*) Content not written by Simon.