I admit it, we are very late with this post. Sadly we always have to choose whether to work on the game or to take a break from development in order to write something about it.

As you may imagine, the choice is a tough one, considering that is never easy to stop working once you have got a good flow going on.

Anyway, let’s talk about the game.

Part 1: Show me some pixels!

Leonard has been hard at work on art. He has finished drawing all the uniforms of all the police divisions, drawn new backgrounds and animations, and he has now moved onto drawing more and more costumes for the rioters.

Currently their animation count is 77, composed of the impressive number of 1000 frames.
We took them all and composed a very big image out of them: don’t you feel it would make a great poster?

Keep in mind that the image size is only that small because it is meant to show how the whole sprite collage looks like.

Speaking of sprites, we are glad to reveal that the graphics of the rioters are procedural, so each one of them will have a different t-shirt, different pants, and different hair.

This dynamic feature is demonstrated quite clearly in the following gif, a work in progress of the policemen animations. Focus on the hair of the Italian policemen! 

 

Part 2: Getting Technical

On the programming side, time has been spent on graphics (by our new programmer Jendrik) and gameplay (by the mighty Danilo).

Jendrik is currently doing wonders in improving our rendering system (in detail, he is making sure everything is pixel perfect, generating extensions for Unity to make it easy to generate meshes out of sprite-sheets, etc…) and optimizing dynamic shadows on mobile devices.

The objective is to obtain the best performances on every machine, without sacrificing details such as dynamic lighting. Results have been incredibly positive, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

At the same time, Danilo is working on the gameplay of our first demo, refining two systems in particular: the input of the game, and the trigger event system.

All in all, we are finding Unity a great tool to work with, very versatile and efficient.

 

Part 3: Designing Systems

Personally, I have been working on the game’s combat system and on tuning its controls and input, together with Danilo.

It is in fact vital to find the right control system for each device, considering that this game is going to be released on multiple platforms. Not that every one will have completely different controls, but there are so many parameters to tweak and test…

I know what you are thinking, PC players! I can assure that your control system will not be a mere porting of the touch input system, but something that suits your powerful gaming machines. Speaking of which, we are also working on a system meant for joypads, in case you were wondering.

To know more about the Input system in RIOT, stay tuned for our next post.

 

 

To wrap up, development on the game is going full steam ahead. We are currently focusing on finishing the first campaign, in order to be able to release a playable demo as soon as possible.
We plan to show you some gameplay the moment it is polished enough, so stay around!