Unseen

 

 

click for larger versions.

 

Synopsis:

Unseen is an upcoming xbox360 Indie Game, created entirely from scratch. I wanted to explore collision and shader effects in an engine, and this led to the closed-source Sol engine that Unseen uses as a base. It currently runs on the xbox at over 100fps, and there is a debugging interface that runs on Windows (which I used to capture the video).

 

The story follows Reana Sempre, the daughter of a noble that ran away to avoid an arranged marriage. At first, she struggles to survive independently, but then Reana is trained to take what she needs from the local thieves. Her noble bloodline gives her the invaluable and practical ability to see into the near future, and she assumes the role of the notorious thief, the "Black Rose".

 

But problems arise when her foresight begins to show nightmarish visions of shadow creatures in the night, and Reana starts seeing another "Black Rose" ruin her reputation with murder and destruction. She must stop the impostor and put an end to the visions, before she enters the nightmare that she foresees.

 

The game is a precursor to the much larger "Silent" project, featuring Aran Acouti, and will have a lot of story oriented around the appearance of Someiran. Gameplay-wise, the player will have a lot of athletic movement (which was heavily inspired by Metanet's freeware game N), and basic attacks. Unseen will also feature a built-in level editor, and a downloadable Windows editor, so that players can make their own levels after finishing the game.

 

Tech:

This game was co-developed with the Sol Engine, so a lot of the tech created for Unseen is described in that page. The background distortion was inspired by the Persistent Distortion Shaders, and used a similar technique in a more controlled and refined way.

 

Basically, each object draws its own distortion and colors into the respective buffers, and then the color buffer is warped with pixel accuracy, using the distortion buffer as the coded amount. All the in-game objects in the video draw a 1px outline of an arbitrary color around their collision geometry, and have a swirling distortion effect. In the background of the distortion buffer, the overall direction of the player's movement was used as the distortion, to keep Reana's hair in roughly the right place over time.

 

This project is a work-in-progress, so more tech will be outlined as it is completed.

 

Team:

Greg Lane (Me) - All content (art, music, and code, but not the fonts...)

 

Gameplay Video: (somewhat lagged by capturing)