Thread by @HLGteam, As we draw closer to releasing INMOST, we wanted to share some [...]

As we draw closer to releasing INMOST, we wanted to share some interesting facts about development, which we’ll be doing every day until release! We've come a really long way since the start and we hope you enjoy our progress as much as we have

#INMOSTDevFact 1: Original Concept
The original name of the game was ‘Murray and the Demons’. The main hero was going to be ‘Murray’, but we later changed it to ‘Adam’.

I chose the name ‘Murray’ because I'm a *huge* fan of Scrubs. In one episode, Zach Braff’s character meets a character played by Matthew Perry who says that he has the "name of an old man" - Murray! We just happened to need an old man name

Our main hero was once much older, and you could see him and his wife sitting on a bench on the first screen. She’s still in a game, but looks a *little* different now. The theme of age and time still runs in our game

We originally planned to only create creepy horror-esque enemies like spiders and bats etc., but after creating our first slime enemy (complete with blobby eyes and mouth!) we decided to make all them follow the slime theme

This is the original first location for Adam. If you’ve played the demo then you’ll know it’s much different now. Here you can see diagonal ramps which we removed somewhere in the middle of development because it caused so much extra animation work

The ‘ramp issue’ also impacted other locations. This is a much older version of the spider cave - ramps n’ all! Dozens of locations like this had to be… deramped and revamped!

Last but not least, we changed how we use colour in the game! This alteration completely shifted the tone and atmosphere of the game, resulting in a new ‘Hidden Layer’ as it were.

Tomorrow I’ll share more about our palette, lighting system and colour correction. Stay tuned!

Hello everyone!
#INMOSTDevFact #2 is here!
Today we will talk about lighting system and colors in INMOST

Fun thing about the lighting system in INMOST is that there is no lighting system. All ‘light’ is prepainted in textures & light simulation by sprites and particles with Additive & Overlay blending

Here are 2 animated fire sprites (one in the center is separate) - radial gradient with separate X, Y, scale animation, particles of smoke, particles of oil drops. Everything with additive or overlay blending material + scale-animated gradient on the right wall for gloss.

Our first particles test. The torches were dropping sparks in unison which looked unnatural, and I spent 3 hours attempting to understand why randomization wasn’t working. Turns out it was a Unity bug.
Unity is a great engine, but sometimes it makes you really mad

All sprites before postprocessing are almost totally grayscale. We add colour by using Colour Correction curves combined with other small tricks

like gradient overlay sprites over the screen.

The information about Color Correction (CC) we needed in particular was stored in Color Theme Nodes (pink circles). When the camera panned into a circle, the CC started to change. The closer to the center, the stronger the influence and up to 5 nodes may affect the camera.

CC is a very powerful instrument to help set the mood of the game. It was a lot of fun to play around with.

Next time we’ll be discussing pre-production, planning and sketches. Stay tuned!

#INMOSTDevFact #3: Pre-production & Planning
Concepting was a huge part of location design. I am pretty bad at hand painting things, but this was fast and efficient. It allowed me to focus on ideas and shapes, instead of polish and rendering.

One of the dozens of checklists I had made. Handwritten lists are much more satisfying than checking off a box in trello!

This is the Witch’s House concept. Sadly, I had to give up this location in the final game, but sometimes you have to make difficult decisions and prioritise your workload.

There are also teeth marks on the cover of my notebook… development was quite stressful at some points

Very quickly we realised that we needed to make development more methodical. Every location should interact with the other, this is the most complex part in location designing. I made backgrounds in Procreate that simulated the pages of a notebook so I could draw over.

A real notebook is good for quick sketches, but then you need to plan everything more carefully, start thinking about the height and distance of the character's jump. The cells were very helpful!

At some point I decided that I didn’t want to use the tile system.

Every location in the game is hand drawn. There are still some foundational tiles, but the whole game world is a few layers of huge sprites sliced in-engine, on location for performance purposes.

Thanks again for taking the time to read all about our crazy little game. Next time is about triggers. Stay tuned!

#INMOSTDevFact #4 Triggers
A huge part of the game logic is based on triggers. It looks a little scary in the editor!

Lots of them are used to make character movement feel more fluid for the player. Each and every corner of the game generates a trigger that says how the character should behave there.

Triggers in some places force the character to use specific animation instead of default one. Default jump is quite high, but sometimes you’re sure that players wouldn’t want to hit the ceiling and need a long jump instead. There are around 10 types of triggers like that.

Some time ago there was a run button which we removed because players would use it constantly, and it breaks the exploration spirit of the game. Now running only works inside running triggers and we use it in specific moments like the Hunter chase scene.

There are a lot of triggers inside the enemies which are used for detecting players, floor, walls, colliders for taking and making damage!

But the Hunter actually is not a real enemy. They are more like animation which plays it’s parts depending on where the player is on the level. We spent many hours trying to create the illusion of complex behavior.

Thank you for reading! Next time I will talk about parallax system in INMOST

#INMOSTDevFact #5 Hidden Layers & Perspective

The game world locations are split into portions of the screen. In the beginning, the camera only moved when the character walked closer to the screen edge. It was much easier to work with art, but later we remade the whole world to make the camera follow the character.

Having the camera follow the character allowed us to make parallax for a background. This doubled location art assets required (hooray?!), but I really like how it looks now. Worth it!
Well, at least when twitter algorithms not making it a mess because of video compression

We use an Orthographic camera in-game. Objects are the same size at any distance which is good for pixel art! It also means that there is no ‘real’ parallax in the game.

So we made a fake parallax!
Some of the objects have a Z position. The game combines objects with the same Z into groups and when the camera moves - game moves these groups with a speed depending on initial Z value.

Z value may be negative to create the illusion of the objects being closer to the camera.

After the camera stops, objects with parallax move a little to make it look pixel-perfect. At least it tries to anyway...

For the art style we chose, it was important to have pixels the same size, no matter how far the object from the camera. That’s why we can’t use Perspective cameras instead of Orthographic. Otherwise far away objects would be *HUGE*.

We did try Perspective cameras for the very first trailer of the game back in 2018, and it’s pretty interesting to see the difference!

Thanks for reading! Next time I will talk about life and animation in INMOST.

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