[GAME] Epitasis - Colorful Exploration and Puzzle Game

[Higuy8000]

Hello everyone! I’ve been working on this project steadily for a couple of months now during my free time.

The game aims to allow you to explore vast beautiful worlds, scattered with ancient technology that echoes of time long past.

Heres a few GIF's from the game I've shown as well:





Quickly thrown from your normal life into these distant and far off worlds, you must solve ancient and cryptic puzzles and search for treasured relics in hopes of learning what happened to the ancient civilization that once called this place home. If all goes well, you may just have a chance to get back to your own.

I’ve mostly just been showing the project off on my twitter when I can, which you can view/follow here to see more. The game is still in its early stages, but most of the core systems are done. At this point it is largely creating levels, puzzles, and other new art assets. There’s a lot of stuff that’s just too much of a WIP to even show here just yet. The game is inspired by audio-visual projects like Tycho and from other games as well like the Talos Principle and RIME. Lastly I should mention the current title of Epitasis is a working title and could change in the future if I find a better name

I’ll be posting more updates here as well now, and providing some breakdowns that people have been asking for (eg: the grass material/setup). Those will be coming later this week when I have some more free time to write them up. In the meantime, let me know whats you guys think!

View the official website for more information: epitasisgame.com

[JTrocks55]

Wow, this looks great! Seems like a unique idea, and the atmosphere is incredible from what I can see. Keep up the good work!

[Higuy8000]

Wow, this looks great! Seems like a unique idea, and the atmosphere is incredible from what I can see. Keep up the good work!

Thanks JTrocks55, I'm glad you like it!

[ConnorTheScot]

Hey Higuy8000,

This is looking really nice! I love the timelapse of the the planet/moon orbiting and also that whole portal/wormhole looks like it could be fun to play with .

Nice work mate, will keep my eyes peeled for more updated!

Connor.

[Jess.Hider]

I've been following your work on Twitter for a while, it's great to see a big post from you on the forums! I really love your colour palette and the waves look lovely

[Higuy8000]

Hey Higuy8000,

This is looking really nice! I love the timelapse of the the planet/moon orbiting and also that whole portal/wormhole looks like it could be fun to play with .

Nice work mate, will keep my eyes peeled for more updated!

Connor.

Thanks Connor! The portal has been super tricky to get right and is something I'm still messing with, especially trying to get it optimized. But the effect is super cool!

I've been following your work on Twitter for a while, it's great to see a big post from you on the forums! I really love your colour palette and the waves look lovely

Thanks for the kind words Jess, I gotta say you guys at Epic have been super helpful in helping me show off the game on twitter. It means quite a lot

I've started working on a breakdown for the grass material which was requested a few weeks ago, should hopefully have it up later today or tomorrow. Cheers!

[Higuy8000]

Hey guys, heres the breakdown for the grass that some people have been asking about.

This same method is used for other foliage too, like the trees, plants, bushes, etc.
There is a few key things you must do to get this right:
• Make sure the grass normals are all pointing up.
• Create a grass texture used on the grass and landscape materials.
• When painting the mesh onto the landscape, align the mesh to the landscape normals.

Here is a small example of what you can expect of your grass or other foliage:



Notice the nice blending and shading from the landscape. This is due to the actual vertex normals of the grass. If we modify the vertex normals to point upwards, this helps with this blending effect, which in the end is key to getting the grass smooth as possible.



In 3ds Max, the grass normals are represented by green lines; they should look like the above the image when you have all of them pointing upwards.

In order to create the proper effect of blending between the grass and actual landscape material/component, they both need to use the same texture and base diffuse material setup. This same method was actually first made by ZacD I believe as I found it over on a reddit post of his a while back, but I’ll cover it again in some more detail. Overall, this is a very easy effect to generate.

Here is the default green grass texture I use. You can make this simply by painting it in photoshop or just finding a grass texture online and applying a gaussian blur filter to it. In my case I did both to find something suitable.



Create 2 new materials: One for your landscape, and one to be applied to the grass mesh.
In both, create the following material node setup and connect it to the diffuse input of the material:



The texture samples are samples from the new diffuse texture we imported. By making them parameters you can easily change the colors or textures and easily create new looking landscapes by using material instances. We will also need to use the material function AbsoluteWorldPosition(), which lines them up to the same spots for the blending.
In the grass mesh material, we next apply a simple 0,0,1 vector, which ensures that all texture normals point upwards as well.



Again, this helps blending between the grass mesh and the landscape component.

In your material settings for the grass mesh material, make sure to disable "Tangent Space Normal" (see last pic).

Lastly, apply your new landscape material to your landscape, and the grass mesh material to the grass mesh. I also recommend disabling dynamic shadows from the grass mesh to improve performance and improve the overall stylized look. I do this on some other foliage as well, largely depending on its size.
The last step that we must do is the paint the grass onto the landscape.
A few things I make sure I do here is align the grass to normals, disable dynamic shadows, and make sure its density is between 150-200. The nice part about this grass mesh and material is that it seamlessly blends between itself and the landscape, so you can fade it out relatively closely to the player without them noticing. You also don’t need it very dense, as again, it’s not super noticeable.

Final outcome:



The biggest things to remember when creating this sort of effect is to use normals that all point up and to use the AbsoluteWorldPosition() function for your texture UV's, so the grass and landscape texture will tile in the same way across your levels.
Lastly, I didn’t shown the entire material inside the actual breakdown, but here it is anyway if you want to see some other bits of it (basically just wind, opacity, etc).



Hope this helps someone! I think I will probably make a blog soon so I can keep posting long breakdowns like this on it. On that same note, if anyone wants to see something else specifically or has a question, let me know!

[Filly_The_Owl]

very much like "the witness" looks good

[Art Goblin]

this looks very beautiful! Thanks for sharing

[Higuy8000]

Thanks guys

Started working on some cave areas today. Pretty dark, looking for some ways to possibly lighten it up a bit. May just need to increase the overall lightness too.

[ConnorTheScot]

Pretty dark, looking for some ways to possibly lighten it up a bit.

Could look at adding some phosphorescent fauna which would add some more lighting, all depends on what is in the caves

[Higuy8000]

Could look at adding some phosphorescent fauna which would add some more lighting, all depends on what is in the caves

Oooo, I like that idea!

[MetricZero]

Very cool, Higuy8000. Came over here from Youtube (Still on my quest to create seamless portals, 40+ hours in research so far). Wanted to compliment you on your work so far, I really love the vibrant colors and overall feel I'm seeing in everything you've posted.

Would love to read a write up on how you accomplished the portal if that offer stands

[Higuy8000]

Very cool, Higuy8000. Came over here from Youtube (Still on my quest to create seamless portals, 40+ hours in research so far). Wanted to compliment you on your work so far, I really love the vibrant colors and overall feel I'm seeing in everything you've posted.

Would love to read a write up on how you accomplished the portal if that offer stands

Still working on this, should hopefully have it up around Saturday. Not sure how often you check Unreal forums, but I'll be sure to let you know on YouTube as well.

--

Posted these on twitter last night, did a overhaul of all my sky variables so I can easily make quick changes to things like colors and other settings. Colors here inspired a bit by No Man's Sky.

[order66]

Love the looks! Really reminds me of The Witness (which is a good thing)