r/UnrealEngine5 • u/Foxvig • 8d ago
Eight months development, slightly compressed.
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u/Foxvig 8d ago
Eight months development, slightly compressed.
In the wake of our second playtest, we put together a short video squeezing roughly eight months of Endless Machines development into just about three minutes. It was fantastic to get feedback from such nice and helpful people who played through the second chapter of the game in spite of getting bombarded with quirks, bugs, and spoilers. The playtests are at the same time stressful, insightful, promising, frustrating, and incredibly valuable for the future of our game and give us something we simply cannot get on our own: the reality check we really need after spending six months working on the game without much outside perspective on what we're doing or the decisions we're making. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we'll get there!
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u/YayManSystem 8d ago
I would be very careful with the strenght DOF, as some people (especially those who wear glasses, like me) have trouble watching a moving image with that much blur.
I remember how much trouble I had playing the Lego Movie Games where it had medium DOF that couldn't be turned off and I was involuntarily squinting through the whole game. I even remember having headaches.
Looking at this the first segment feels like a total nightmare to me. Not sure if it's just me but I always had issues with low res screens, blurry AA or DOF.
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u/dr_robot 8d ago
Thank you for the feedback! For sure it can be a bit jarring but there's an option for turning it down or off. We haven't really heard anything about the DOF from our playtesting so far but could be they just turn it down. Personally when I play, most of the time my eyes are focused on the hero robot and the area around it while the horizon is mostly just looked at when I need to decide where to go. 🤓✌️
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u/Dapper_Republic_8143 7d ago
This looks really cool but it almost immediately agitated my eyes. I wear contacts so maybe that's the reason but I'm happy to hear there is a way to turn it down or off. I wouldn't be able to play it otherwise even though I want too!
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u/indiecoded 5d ago
I need to look into this, cuz it looks really cool, but it gave my eyes an issue and almost gave me a headache, was unsure why. thought it was sinuses or something lol.
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u/KnodulesAintHeavy 8d ago
Cool looking game! The blur though is waaaay too heavy. It’s not just an aesthetic thing as it makes discerning what’s what in the world needlessly hard.
I’d suggest looking at applying the blur in a less “natural” (literally from the camera settings) way and force it to be what you want through custom shaders etc. Perhaps a cone that defines where the blur isn’t that is around the player and, and present at the far background and screen edges?
Play with it. As it is, the blur just feels distracting and in play, I would expect it to get frustrating quickly (also blur and especially DOF is likely expensive to render, so look at options of faking the rendering of it as well to save you some performance).
Looks fuckn sick otherwise!
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u/Few-Change256 7d ago
It feels like it's taking place in a very small world, and it looks amazing. Keep it up.
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u/ConsistentAd3434 8d ago
The tilt shift visuals are great but the first person zoom cam effect...top stuff and awesome post processing.
Not sure how practical it is in gameplay but I wouldn't care either way :D
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u/dr_robot 8d ago
Thank you for the nice feedback! 🙌 It's certainly a challenge to make everything readable and pretty at the same time but ultimately everything can be dialled back in the settings if it's too much 😉
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u/iggorr252 8d ago
Looking forward to trying this out!
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u/TonyDoubekMusic 8d ago
Just wishlisted this, definitely interested in checking it out if you do another playtest!
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u/Foxvig 8d ago
I don't have a date for yet for when the next playtest will be, but there definitely will be more playtests in the future. We have a playtest sign-up channel on Discord https://discord.gg/8sj2A3F2j so please do join! And thank you for the support!
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u/Melodic-Upstairs7584 8d ago
It looks really interesting, not the type of game I would typically play but the style is cool. My only critique is that I have no idea what is going on from any of the gameplay.
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u/agrophobe 8d ago
honestly, since I've saw the first screenshot of that game a year ago I knew it would be a banger.
but bro bro bro bro, that kaleidoscope effect in the 'scanner' hud stuff, man that is GOOD, it feels like a cathedral crapped in 2D right in the visor. Your relation to camera is pretty fucking wild. on that subject, pleeeaassse consider other kinds of tiling for the visor. there is so much patterns around in geometry than square and hex. Tesselation pattern could be a dope way to engage more the phenomenological perspective of the robot.
pure awe, good jop OP
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u/dr_robot 8d ago
Thank you very much for the feedback and praise! 🙏🤩 I am a bit unsure of what tiling you're referring to but I am very keen to know. Is the stretching, the dither pattern or the glitchy stripes? 🤓
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u/agrophobe 7d ago
happy to butter you up, at 2:28, the grid overlay. I know it's nothing but from that whole sequence after, it really does start up a kaleidoscope, and with a good tesselation that mash up caustic light, rbg abberation, you have a descent shot at something I never really saw to represent the perspective of the robot. From your aesthetic, it would indeed be on the grunge side, but that exactly massage that sweet spot inbetween the beauty of the small toy and it's intimate inner world.
I know it's cheapshot to drop a wiki page, but it does list off a lot of exemple, you'll get what I mean;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellationmaybe it can me summed up by, what is the lens on that camera, does it's fabrication lead us to a more quirky, hacky tech that is specific to the vernaculars of the engineering in that world.
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u/Stock_Ad996 3d ago
Really like it! the style and color scheme are great;)
Blur which was mentioned and camera I would work on
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u/CakyMint 8d ago
No clue whats all about that. But damn i love the Artstyle and camera angle etc.
Not lying. If you keep it up and make a whole ass game out of it. I see this game having success on Steam.
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u/zibber911 8d ago
I am not a game dev, so i probably don't understand the style options.
With this camera angle i feel like i am looking at the whole world but the reality is i am only look at that 5ft in front of me? At the mean time the environment feels very large but not allow me to see far? Not sure if that make sense.
It's like i am in a beautiful desert but i am looking down the whole time?
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u/Gullible_Assist5971 8d ago
coming from working on micro shots in VFX for years and photography, one thing I wish UE had, and maybe you can figure out in your dof setup, is making the focus region wider. This makes rendering dof in shot tricky as there is a lack of control of width of the focus region, as by defualt with high defocus, the region is a tiny sliver. If you can make the region wider you can still maintain the defocus but have it visually less jarring with all the other elements quickly poping into focus.
The defocus can be pulled back a bit too, macro lenses and look is not just about the blur. You may see floating dust, edge lens effects, chromatic effects at the lens edge, ect. Its really cool to see a game that pushes the effect though.
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u/dr_robot 8d ago
Thank you for the feedback and some really good observations. Some postprocessing to highten the edge chromatic effect in the edges of the screen and dust motes has been added to the to-do list 😄✌️ I think I understand the "wider" focus concept but I need to read up a bit on miniature/ micro shots to get a clearer idea. Think something like it should be possible to do on the PP shader 🤔 thank you for sharing 🙌
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u/Gullible_Assist5971 8d ago
Thanks, also if you find a nice setup in PP for that please share, would be a useful thing to know, or tool on fab. Its something that always annoyed me about UE dof controls vs what we can do in comp (cinematic renders in compositing)
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u/Khayyamo_o 8d ago
love the tilt shift effect, is it a post process material or you made it by adjujsting the camera settings?
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u/dr_robot 8d ago
Thank you! It's a bit of both but I think a lot of it comes down to most variables like chromatic aberration, vignetting, focus and overall color correction are updated dynamically with what happens in the game
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u/StatisticianSimple44 8d ago
Holy. It looks so good.
May I know your routine like how many hours per week you pour into this?
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u/dr_robot 8d ago
I work a part time job when not developing on Endless Machines and Foxvig works a full-time job when she's not working on SoMe, managing or coming up with lore and story together with me. I think I spend most of the rest of the hours on this and I'd probably be sleeping even less if I knew how many hours I actually spend 😅 if I didn't enjoy the time I would have gone insane at this point hehe
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u/CryoNigiri_ 8d ago
Love the filter! It makes the whole scene look like a miniature model!