It’s been a busy couple of weeks and we’re making good progress towards some big features.

Seasons & Weather

The passage of time, the ebb and flow of the world; these are some of the most important parts of our plan for Before. The relationship between the player, their tribe and the world is integral to how we want the game to play and feel. You will need to be mindful of the elements, reacting to changing weather conditions and challenges they will present for your tribe.

I’ve begun exploring how we might implement these systems and while it’s quite simple at this stage, it’s still nice to see the landscape start to change. We want each season to feel distinct, both in how the environment looks and the way in which people and animals behave.

This video shows the transition from Autumn to Winter and then into Spring. This process will normally take several months, but I’ve condensed it into roughly 48 hours of sped-up game time.

Diogo has written a new version of the terrain shader that I had been prototyping, and some great extension scripts to help manage how everything fits together. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but this all means that can I achieve the style I want and still make use of Unity’s native terrain features. We still have a few issues to solve in this area, but we’re nearly there.

AI & Simulation

Most importantly, Pål has continued his work on the core systems that govern agents in our world. We’ve reached a major milestone with the initial implementation of two of the three major systems here.

The final piece of the puzzle is the simulation of “needs” for each agent, which are the driving force behind most AI behavior. Once that system is implemented we can start to iterate more rapidly, designing behaviors and tweaking the values that will bring the world to life.

Land ahoy!

For the next blog entry we’ll have some video to show where things are headed. The next few weeks promise to be a real turning point in the development, and we’re really excited to see things come together.

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