BrightRidge - Open World wilderness for IOS

UPDATE #3 BrightRidge is coming to Mac and PC






UPDATE #2: version 1.2 is on the appstore with new features - Jumping and Sliding, Dynamic Weather, Shapechanging, Atmospheric scattering, New Quality Options and Customizations, high res mode and more: Download it here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id885657108?mt=8

UPDATE: BrightRidge is on the Apple App Store. Download it here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id885657108?mt=8

There's a new announcement thread on the Showcase forum here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/nimian-legends-brightridge-open-world-wilderness.257603/

Well, after about 3 years I've finished my second IOS game, Nimian Legends : BrightRidge, an open-world wilderness with exploration, not violence, as the focus. I'm submitting it to the App store and hopefully it will be accepted. Please share this with anyone you think might like it. Here's the trailer and the scoop:

Nimian Legends : BrightRidge Trailer

​

Lose yourself in a vast open world fantasy wilderness!

Experience total freedom as you run, swim and even fly anywhere in a large 3d world, unlocking new abilities and learning the legends and lore of BrightRidge. Explore a world where violence is optional and exploration is the key. Discover BrightRidge explore its beautiful forests, raging rivers and mountain peaks.

DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE FANTASY WILDERNESS

• Explore an open world. Go anywhere anytime from the start.
• Unlock new powers through interaction with the environment
• Walk, run, swim , teleport and fly through gorgeous natural landscapes

INTERACT WITH THE NATURAL ECOSYSTEM FILLED WITH WILDLIFE

• Hunt Foxes, bears, deer and more or use SpiritView to watch them in their habitat
• Uncover the rich history of BrightRidge by interacting with citizens and landmarks
• Experience total freedom with Non-linear exploration based gameplay

EXPERIENCE RICHLY DETAILED NATURAL BEAUTY AND STUNNING VISTAS

• Immerse yourself with Complete weather effects like rain, fog, wind and snow
• Relax in beautiful natural scenery - mountains, forests and valleys, hillsides and rivers
• Change perspective and Fly through the skies as a mighty eagle

It's a beautiful open world wilderness in the palm of your hand.

Can you discover all the secrets BrightRidge has to offer?

Find out more at : http://protopop.com/games/brightridge/

 

I dig it. Looks very impressive.

 

Thanks Bridin I can see you've been busy with Unity for a few years too. Your development blog is a good idea, and it's inspirationsl to see how rough sketches are turned into finished products. If you feel now's the right time for 100 Orcs I say wholeheartedly go for it

 

This looks really nice. What devices do you support?

 

Thanks Ayrik. It works on iPhone 5+, iPad 3+, and iPad Mini Retina.

If I can save up enough to buy Unity's Android Pro plugin it will be on Android too

I have a few adjustments with the mouse control, then it will be released on PC/Mac

BTW Saga Heroes looks terrific! Im sorry it wasnt funded - it's hard isnt it to create art and run up against the brutal realities of business. But it's the love of game design, and hopefully touching on something artistic, that keeps me going.

 

It's quite, thanks. I don't mind working on it for fun, but it would've been nice to work on it full time.

Looks like I don't have any device that can run it, but it looks like a great idea. Focusing on something other than violence for a game is something I've been looking into myself (after Saga Heroes, lol).

 

This looks awesome! I'm working on something vaguely similar to this in concept I think. Hey, you should spread this around more! I can barely find anything about this game anywhere. Its worth spreading around.

 

My jaw just dropped to the floor when i saw your stuff. Wow it is so beautiful. The stones and earth mix and the river shores

i completely get it about the exploration thing. My game was originally called "Nimian Battles" - theres even a trailer for it - but then i was like, no im really a world designer - thats what i love, and that's why i enjoy GTA and Just Cause etc, for the discovery. So i refocused on that. You can actually hunt everything in my game, but the focus is off violence. Actually if you kill, say, a bear, you lose the ability to use "spiritview" and see the world through there eyes so there's some penalty to the violence.

I think its the kind of thing that will take me a few games to find the right balance.

Anyways your game looks amazing and i cannot wait to try it out.

Oh yeah, and thanks for the encouragement to spread it around. My friend said i lacked "discoverability" so i am seeing a trend here i need to get on

 

My jaw dropped when I saw yours! Seriously I think there is a huge hole for this kind of game, and I'm glad I've stumbled onto yours. I anxiously await your release! As far as your discoverability, I don't know if you've seen this, but it might be helpful to you. Now that you're getting close to finishing, I'm curious: What was that hardest part of development for you?

 

That's a really good question - and thanks for that link , those resources are just what i need.

Overall it's the business stuff - the design is fueled by passion which is kind of endless, bt the business is such a huge necessity. Ive come to realize that unless you're lucky you really need to market your stuff and the job is almost as much as making the game itself.

as for the game design part, that's tricky. I think it's fixing huge bugs, setting up the xcode stuff, the technical details that arent as fun as making landscapes and designing things for me, but they're part of the process and at the end, its the things i thought would be small like the GUI that end up being really substantial projects. It's pretty daunting near the last 10% having this list of remaining things that seems to grow and grow, and it takes a lot of discipline to freeze the scope and put some of the great ideas aside for the next game.

I find what helped me with this was evaluating my projects scope and making some big decisions. When this game was called Nimian Hunter Salvation it was 20 square kiometres - huge, with underground tombs and an 4 square kilometres of ocean trench with caves and sea life etc, and i had a few beasts in teh works to kill, all very shadow of the colossus-y and then i was like "Ill NEVER finish this". So, i thought hard and made the decision to shrink the game. I divided it up into 4 smaller games (this is teh first one) and now its just 4 square kilometres and that allowed me to actually finish things. When something comes up that's hard to surmount in game design, i find simplifying things can help.

The other thing that helped was i adopted an onbject oriented philosophy and use proceduralism when possible. The object oriented part meant instead of designing linear hard coded paths now the widllife etc does its own thing and each thing interacts (more or less) with the others, making it easier for me to add new things. And the landscape is procedurally created as well as the vegetation. This was super important because now im able to recreate the whole world if anything goes wrong.

I know this is a lot but theres one more thing that literally made me sick when i encountered it - like heart attack. Its game breaking bugs. The 3 or 4 times that everything just didnt work (crash on iphone, stop dead etc). But Ive learned that even when that happens it doesnt mean the end of your project. There's ALWAYS and answer. Sometimes it just takes some really extensive troubleshooting to work your way back to uncover what's wrong.

Anyways all that has helped and going forward im going to continue making things OO and more encapsulated and continue to refine the procedural process to help me create more faster. Or burnout because i dont sell any and am left broke (let's hope its closer to the first one

Do you have any tips about your process. Like do you decorate all of that by hand?

 

Hi Everyone,

Just an update that BrightRidge is available now for iPhone 5 and up, with iPad support on the way.

Download it here : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id885657108?mt=8

 

Hey, just caught up on this thread! loved your talk on the hardest parts of the design pipeline (things to look forward too)

Glad you finally got it released! Looks beautiful, maybe ill grab it on IPad

Good luck with part 2

 

Thanks Earthyn

It is a lot of work be develop games on your own, but if you really enjoy it that is a large part of the reward. Now that im more experienced, im paying more attention to my health - not going tooooo overboard with unhealthy hours, or stressing about making a million - and also working more on structuring the work so it's easier and marketing the games (because you need to eat too

Right now it works on iPad 4 and up, and the iPad mini with retina display. You can download the iPhone version and play it on iPad, but a native iPad universal app is coming in the next update. I just wanted to get my feet wet on 1 device first to see if there was any major issues. So far there has been some really helpful feedback that will help me improve the experience, and people have said some really encouraging things, which is great for artists to hear.

 

I definitely typed a response to this, but I guess I got distracted before hitting the post button. That's all very interesting information for me. It seems a big down-scoping is extremely common, even on triple-A projects. I think that was very wise, and to finish a project of the scale you did shows you must be a very smart decision maker.

Eastshade is also 4 square kilometers, though its surrounded by water so in reality its smaller than that. There will be some subterranean areas but I'm trying to keep it small so I can focus on making every corner rich (we'll see how that goes haha). I place things with various mesh painting tools. I have literally every painter from the asset store. Geo painter is the one I end up using most.

Are you going to do a pc release!?!?!?

 

I downloaded it, it's AMAZING man, very impressive.
I can't believe it.

 

Looks amazing, was about to purchase but only have a 4s

 

Thanks for the encouraging words Geo Painter - thanks for the tip!

I use Terrain Composer. I could not have made the world without it. It procedurally lays down the vegetation based on your rules and made it much simpler to place a variety of plantlife in semi realistic fashion.

Yes a WIndows and Mac version is in the works. I just bought a Steel Series IOS controller and have been adding gamepad support to the game. Its really cool because you can use a PS3 controller just like that with a mac to test things out. Originally this game was PC based and had mouse controls, so its kind of ironic that im working to put those controls back in I want to make sure i have a single master file so the trickiest part is making sure all types of controls work (touch, mouse, gamepad) without interfering with the other types.

 

Thanks Menfou! That's really great to hear because some people have downloaded it for iPod but it doesnt support that (and as John G. says iPhone 4S). I'm happy to hear that it's a positive experience for someone and that you like it. BTW if you get tired of exploring, you can activate teh cheats in the options menu and instantly unlock things like the ability to transform into an eagle and fly around (you can also get this power by exploring the tower tops)

 

Hey John G., yeah, I'm sorry I wasn't able to support the 4S (great phone!) out of the gate. Strangely the original version ran on 4S but somewhere in the switch from the original game to this new version i lost 4S support (and iPad mini etc..). I know that it is possible to have this (or at least the original which had less AI but was 4 times as big!) running on a 4S so part of my upgrades will be to try and optimize the life out of it and bring it back. I'm glad you saw the warning though. Literally my biggest stress in all of this is the fact that it runs only on iPhone 5 and up (and soon Ipad Air and iPad mini retina) but there's no way to easily restrict app downloads to certain devices. I always saw those games that were like "only works on new stuff" and i was like "that's too ambitious", now im in teh exact same situation I think with a new ipad and iphone basically every year, each with exponentially increasing power, gaining control of the device fragmentation is going to increasingly become an issue IOS developers will need to overcome.

 

Might just have to upgrade to an iphone5 some day, but for now heck I purchased any way

 

I just think you must add more light, it's very dark.
I think the fpsis too low, it's possible to see the fps ?
I have a iPad Air.

 

Thanks for the support John Every dollar goes into my game design and learning, and i promise to do the best work i can here

 

Thanks for that feedback - it's really helpful. I did some tests before and by adding a bit more sunlight bouncing around teh scene I can lighten things up a bit. I might try that in an update.
I think there is an fps kit that i can install but id like to keep the GUI clean as possible. Maybe i will add one as an option setting.
If you have an iPad air, you can download the iPhone version and play it on your iPad basically fullscreen (when youre in the app store search for nimian and make sure that "iphone" apps is selected in teh search filters. I have the iPad versions ready to go and am just waiting to get a week or 2s worth of feedback before I submit the update to the app store (it'll be a universal app).

 

Well finally upgraded to an iPhone 6+ so get to finally travel the lands of Knight bridge .
Any updates planned for the future?

 

Cool John - Im glad you're going to check it out, and congratulations on your new phone, they are super fast Anyways great timing - i've submitted BrightRidge Update 1.2 and am just waiting for approval from Apple - if all goes well it should be available in a few days on the app store. Here's the release notes:

Nimian Legends : BrightRidge Update 1.2

Nimian Legends : BrightRidge Update 1.2 brings new mechanics to the game that allow you to explore and experience your environment in even more ways. I’ve just finished the updates and am uploading it to the Apple App Store where it should be available soon.

FEATURES

Jumping

Player can now jump (very cool)
2 custom jump animations
New Sliding animations


Custom Options

Camera distance and height presets or incremental changes
Change atmospheric scattering types
Change weather type and frequency
Custom quality options: choose between speed or detail
On/Off Fog, reflections, grass
Customize camera height and zoom or choose from 4 camera presets
High Resolution Option


Dynamic Weather

Dynamic weather algorithm changes weather as you explore
Rain, fog, wind, RainWind, storm and hurricane
Plants react to wind effects
Chance for rainbow after rainfall


Shapechanging

Change and play as new animal types
3 new towers unlock animal forms
Deer, Butterfly and Fox shapechanging


Atmopsheric Scattering

Atmospheric Scattering creates beautiful atmospheric glow
7 Custom Atmispheric Scattering presets


Light Ability

New light power in addition to Staff and Arrow
Banish option removes enemies from game allowing pure exploration
Skadad: The Skadad: Corrupted villagers freed by light now roam the wilderness



IMPROVEMENTS

• Redesigned Option User interface
• Optimized Lightmapping
• Object and performance optimizations
• New detail objects and plants
• New Landmarks and waterfalls
• big optimization and refactoring of code for simpler, faster updates
• Optimized particles (removed shadow casting)
• “Saving: game icon when saving progress
• Game now saves region and restarts in same local
• Game save Spawn points restart player in last travelled region
• Removed old buttons and code / new streamlined button structure , faster and more flexible
• New GUI Icon Designs
• Separated location titles from description for clear view
• Slower, more realistic, swimming speed
• Improved balance beam camera views
• Higher default camera on deer
• iPad option button is now in middle by default
• change mip map filtering from kaiser to box for performance
• increased the default camera height slightly
• World map
• More realistic climbing angle limits
• Staff lights up when LIGHT power is active
• Viewdots now display location title only so view is not blocked
• Viewdot “?” btton shows extra location detail on demand
• More descriptions and history for locations

FIXES

• Fixed Spirit view overlaying tutorial texts
• Custom camera controls for flying creatures
• disable action button on spirit view
• disabled jumping underwater
• Fog disabled by default on legacy devices
• Animals Forms will not swim below water
• Hide jump button for animal forms
• Disabled bird tutorial text when changing to spirit view
• removed camera change on tower climb - too confusing and now you have camera control
• Weather stays outside Inn
• Added missing collision to certain items
• Viewdots use faster billboard code (vs old smooth loot at)
• removed overlap between Stag territory and BrightRidge family triggers
• jumping on beams doesn’t disable zoom effect
• Added missing waterfall sounds
• Shapechanges now retain default camera zooms when entering/exiting view dots
• Animals no longer run underwater
• Disabled fog no longer reactivates when emerging from water

 

Nice, some very nice changes indeed.
Look forward to trying out the new version.

 

Thanks John - I hope you enjoy exploring BrightRidge, and I appreciate the support

 

BrightRidge update 1.2.1

I’m submitting update 1.2.1 to the app store tomorrow, hopefully it will be approved soon. I’m doing smaller but more frequent updates now as i am close to finishing the mechanics before i do the big “Quests” update. Here’s a rundown of the new features

Photo Mode
enter photo mode to freely move the camera and take screenshots that are saved to your iPhone or iPad’s camera roll. The screenshots in this post were taken on my iphone using this feature. I think it might make promoting the game a bit easier too if people can compose their own shots and share them



First Person View
You can now explore BrightRidge in first person mode. It looks pretty cool If you attack while in First Person mode your bow becomes your default weapon.

Optimizations
I reduced the source file size by half and fixed the 300 or so Unity warnings by removing all the obselete code. These warnings in Unity 4 became errors in unity 5 so its all part of a massive code and asset clean up that should make the game much faster over the next few updates

River Splashes
Now your players feet splash when walking in a river as well as walking in lakes

Splash Screen GUI
The splash screen options have been updated to match the rest of the game’s option screens


Bug Fixes
A lot of them

I’ll post an update here as soon as/if apple approves the update. I am already working on update 1.2.2 that brings a cool new feature – portal grenades – more on that soon but it’s a cool new way to travel around BrightRidge.

In the meantime here’s a few more screenshots taken with the new Photo Mode feature

 

BrightRidge is coming to Mac and PC.

Here's a few shots of the beta. It includes better anti-aliasing, farther draw distances, increased details and real-time shadows

 

BrightRidge Cemetary



One of these trees is not like the other...

 

This is beautifull.
I like a lot the idea of "exploration non-violent focus" for this style of game, thanks for making a game like that

 

Thank you zenGarden I think the new IOS metal version and the Mac and PC versions are looking really good.

It's funny because ive felt this pressure to add violence to the game. Many people dont like or understand it being about exploration. I am adding some quests in (i love quests) but i am increasingly moving towards marketing this and focusing on the exploration aspect. I mean that's what's at the DNA of this world. Or at the very least ramping down any emphasis on violence.

Violence does exist in the world (you can hunt animals) because real life is like that. But id like to learn to communicate or engage with players in other ways whenever possible. Thanks so much for you comment

 

You could even avoid the animal hunt, just make the hero vegetarian
He would hunt fruits and specific herbs or vegetable and could cultivate them

If he had some home area he could make and fortify it throught time to avoid animals coming and eating all your vegetables you would have cutivated.
You could even expend your game with some taming system, by capturing some animals.
It is some trading merchants system ? like selling some htings you would have hunted or gathered, to buy better equipement later ?
What about secondary quests like :
- Find some villager that get lost or something someone would have lost in some zone
- Protect and guide a villager that want to travel to another village throught dangerous zone
- Gather ressources for a villager request
- Explore and read some magic stone text and report it to someone
- Build a bridge, by gahtering enought wood
There is lot of ideas possible from building, taming, quests for non violent games.

Keep the good work.

 

I just bought BrightRidge for my iPad air 2, fantastic bit of work. The only thing I find annoying, it it's upside down. I operate my iPad with the key button on the left. In that configuration, this app is upside down and will not rotate, so I can't even use the stands I have. Otherwise I'm looking forward to future updates to BrightRidge.

 

Thanks Cdngater so much for supporting BrightRidge and for your feedback Rotating is coming - that bugged a few people. Its just because it wasn't working in the the version of Unity I was using. Now I've upgraded to 4.6, and as soon as the 64bit export is ready (its buggy for the moment but they are working on it) i'll be able to upload new builds to the app store.

I'm also working on the PC and Mac version - see attached It add more detail, further draw distances and realtime shadows - and im working to port these to a Metal update too (once either unity 5 is ready or unity 4.6 gets Metal support) - i have a version with realtime shadows running on iPhone 6 and it looks great, and it will work on your iPad air 2 too.

 

I really like the vegetarian bit actually. no reason the hero couldn't be one.

Ive been talking with Mixamo, and i am working on an update to let us choose a man or a woman character.

Many of the quests coming are based on the concept of Spirit and Speed, so the suggestions you made would work well with that. i like the idea of adding a bit of farming idyllic living into the game

There is also 3 more environments on the way (in 3 separate apps). Here is a picture of part 2, DoonPillar, but there is also a magical forest coming - Golden Wood - and the farming life would work well in there.

 

Right now I'm waiting for Unity5 to stabilize before I upgrade, but i am running tests on Mac/PC and IOS metal. It allows for better lighting, detail and shadows

 

What about performance ? does it keep good also increasing grass distance visibility ?
Is there some specific shaders out of the box for vegetation ?

You make gorgeous outdoors, keep it up.

 

Thanks ZenGarden

On IOS the main bottenecks is ram. A6+ chips process everything fast, but too many textures or too far a detail draw distance eats ram and leads to crashes, so you have to keep an eye out for that.

ON MAc/PC i have a fast macbook, but everything runs really smoothly even with a ton of detail. There are a lot of customization options at the start of the mac version so you can choose lower settings, like in Skyrim, to match your PC or mac.

So far on PC MAC the detail distance can be set very high even on older computers. The game was designed for mobile so i think the optimization mindset ive had with it has led to a pretty cpu lightweight MAC version.

No specific shaders, i just use the unity detail and tree shaders. Id like to use the advanced foliage shaders but ive never been able to get them or ATS to work. I keep trying though

I really love designing nature areas and want to get really good at it so i appreciate the kind words.

 

Are you working alone on the project ?

 

Yes but I'm using the Unity asset store for most of the assets. In the first version i was modelling the trees and pillars etc before I realized it would be impossible Thanks to the asset store it's kind of like painting a picture - you can just concentrate on the art direction, the plant placement and making the scene look as natural as possible.

 

So i am pretty much switched to Unity 5 for the new BrightRidge (with metal) update and the Mac and PC release. It's been a real challenge to upgrade because U4 and U5 workflows are very difefrent in areas, but the lightng and PBS in U5 is beautiful

 

i love your terrains, mind giving some advice how you did the terrain ? what method / plugins you used? how you optimised for performance?

 

Thanks Damien

Non-technically, i have a passion for creating wildernesses. I like the outdoors in real life and i think as simulations improve that open world wildernesses could have positive, calming impacts on people.

I build my terrains in Vue software using fractals and some hand created heightmaps. It takes a lot of experimentation to find something that feels right.

I import the heightmap into Unity and i use Terrain Composer plugin to place the foliage and some objects procedurally: http://www.terraincomposer.com/

I can't stress how useful terrain composer is. It handles most of the terrain textures and places and paints things procedurally so it's repeatable. I use handmade maps to place certain objects only in certain places.

On iPhone for optimization i test on devices (it works on A6 chips and up) and change various things like detail distance. I find having a lot of grass detail in heavy density is a big crasher. Other than that its just basic Unity occlusion and cutting down less important textures in size wherever i can. On desktop alpha so far you can run it with much more detail.

A lot of the look is what i learned from playing Shadow of the Colossus - it was messy and dusty and foggy and moody, and i paint the atmosphere the same way. Lots of dust, atmospheric scattering, etc really help give the scene atmosphere.




Another important part of the process is making sure everything fits together. I put together various art direction documents to keep me on track and provide inspiration



If you have any specific questions let me know.

 

thanks for all these details, i thought terrain composer was only for desktop & high end terrain, does it have some option to make low geometry terrain ? can i ask how much poly is your terrain and what you used for optimise its geometry ?

your maps look very wide, didnt know it was possible to achieve much detailled terrain like this on mobile

 

Im not sure how many polys in the terrain because i think unity just determines that on its own in the engine - i use a standard terrain 2048x2048 in size. But my height map is just 256x256pixels. Maybe the lower the size of the heightmap the more the performance? but thats just a guess, i dont know if that affects it.

AFAIK terrain composer doesnt do anything that is specifically for mobile or desktop. For example you can use it to place trees on the terrain, but at the end of the day its just trees on terrain whether or not you used TC or painted some on by hand. What matters is the amount of details you place in the scene, i think you just get a feeling for how much your phone can take when you test it, feel its frame rate, experience its stability. and pull back when you've added too much. And Terrain composer doesn't, i think, modify the terrain polynumber. But you can speed things up by increasing the pixel error on the terrain, but you will sacrifice some detail in distant terrain and some more popin effects.

BTW the image in the last few posts are from the upcoming mac version. But here is some screenshots from the next update which is bringing realtime shadows to mobile. These are taken on an iPhone 6:











and of course there is the version on the app store now, without realtime shadows but still looking quite good if you have an A6 device or higher:

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/nimian-legends-brightridge/id885657108?mt=8

 

Nimian Legends BrightRidge 1.3 has updated areas, like the shadowy BaedulWood just outside BrightRidge Inn.

 

I've been able to bring a lot of improvements im making to the Mac version to the iPhone update. I'm getting quite close in quality on the iPhone 6 thanks to metal. These are actual screenshots from iphone and mac.

 

Many landmarks in BrightRidge have been updated with new details in the upcoming update 1.3, and a new species of tree has been introduced which really enhances BrightRidge's forests.

 

Nimian Legends BrightRidge 1.3 running on iPhone 6

Realtime Shadows, Atmospheric scattering, puddles, realtime reflections, High Dynamic Range rendering, Depth of Field