Welcome to our second INDUSTRIA Dev-Blog! Lets start right away:

As you probably know, INDUSTRIA is a first-person shooter, and for a first-person shooter you need weapons. Idealy, a few of them. When we started the project, INDUSTRIA was not even a FPS. It was only 1 year after the development started, when we decided that INDUSTRIA needs weaopons, needs a way to fight back the enemies. Our modeling and animation skills were obviously not very far developed back then and as you can imagine, the visual quality changed dramatically over the last 2 years. Lets have a look at the very first iteration of weapons in INDUSTRIA, from january 2018:



Plain weapons without textures, slow fire animation, double handed, huge particle effects, a free placeholder sound and a block out rifle model. Thats about it. It looks pretty terrible. Lets take a look at the next version, 8 months later, in september 2018:



Well, quite a big leap. We now have the rifle fully modeled out, a new weapon, the smg added and all textured, all with proper reload animations. I remember being very proud of the reload animations I did back then (never did anything like this before). But they still dont feel very responsive. The rifle is a lever rifle, with a bullet after bullet reload animation the player was able to interrupt. Pretty cool (but also very buggy sometimes). Lets jump 2 months further into november 2018:



Wow! Bullet casings! And all new positions and scaling! Also, screen shake added! Oh, but something is missing- all reload animations are gone. I remember looking at BF1 weapon positioning, you can see that on the slightly left angled SMG. Still the shitty and very loud placeholder sounds. Lets move on quickly, it hurts to look at this mess. Now, 1 month later, december 2018:



Ahaaaa! The first open cummunity Alpha we did with the Discord server members. Beautiful and exciting houres and days when we let hundreds of people play INDUSTRIA for the first time.We have better idle animations on the pistol now. Rifle still lacks any animations. But the SMG feels pretty solid now. Not much to say to this so lets make a big jump, half a year later, to june 2019:



Oh, but what is that? An Axe? This was the second public Alpha we run with the community. In these last months we tweaked quite alot things with the gunplay. We removed the silly particle effects and added proper smoke particles (too much and bright ones, but mor about that later). All animations are a bit more snappy and short. I made a few new sounds that are less annoying and more satisfying. But most importantly, we added the melee weapon (it was there before but not very defined). It now features 3 different hit animations, and 3 different miss animations (when the player just hits into the air). Animation inspiration was, of course, Half-Life 2's crowbar. I literally watched Valves animations over and over again in slow motion, trying to figure out why it feels so good. Whatever, another 6 months on top, january 2020:



Again, new positions, closer to camera. Also, new weapon change animations and raise and lower animations. The Axe is now two handed instead of the crowbar like one handed. All animations have been retouched by our animator to get rid of the hard keyframe animations I did (I did not know how to use the animation curves in Blender so I literally hard key framed every move with the standard linear interpolation. The outcome is alot of work for alot of problems). Also: New sounds again. This time, I sat down, listened to the new CoD: MW's gun sounds and rebuilt all of them from scratch with new samples I bought from the FMOD library (wonderful and easy to use sound library btw). We are nearly there, so lets make another 4 month jump to the current look and feel:



So, this is how the weapons look right now. We got rid of the rifle and built a new one. No lever action, but single shot bolt action (mainly a gameplay reason). Also, I retextured all 4 weapons with Substance painter and a proper High-Lowpoly bakes. Again, animations retouched to be more snappy. And most importantly: Iron sights. INDUSTRIA only ever had hipfire available. Right click is lowering and raising the weapons. Right click is now the standard iron sights, which slows the game down dramatically from the arcade feeling to a tactical, imersive shooter (best decision ever). Finaly we tweaked the annoying way to bright smoke particles, so that they are darker and a bit more subtle.

Now, thats it. I am still not happy with the gun visuals. Their textures and normals are still work in progress, and we are still missing a few sounds. But we are getting there. Never stop improving is probably one of the biggest takeaways here. Its a wonderful example for how the developers skills change over the development cycle, replacing content over and over again.. Someone told me once a wise thing: Dont be frustrated to redo things, as your second try will always be better.

Thanks for stopping by and see you next time!

Best wishes and stay healthy,
David


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172650

Greetings, this is David from the Bleakmill Team!

This is the first official Devblog for INDUSTRIA, our Steampunk shooter we are developing since 3 years now. Expect to see more of these throughout the upcoming weeks and months. We will share them on Steam as an update to the game as well as on our Discord channel. So lets get started shall we?

We recently did a live stream on our YouTube channel about this exact subject. If you want to rewatch it, you can do so here:



BUILDING BUIDLINGS

As you probably can imagine (INDUSTRIA is set in a steampunk city for those who dont know) we need alot of buildings to let the games urban environments really feel like a living, breathing city. If you believe it or not, since we started to do concepts for this game back in 2015, we went through three different approaches to make this happen.

See, the problem of buildings in video games, especially first- and third person-shooters, is their size and at the same time their level of detail. Textures have to be crisp when getting close to the buildings (reaaaally close in a FPS like INDUSTRIA) but at the same time, just using a texture that tiles will look bad, because the building would lack any unique weathering and dirt effects.

OVER THE YEARS

Our first approach back in 2016 was a modular system, but the texturing never saw the light of day. Check out this screenshot from literally 5 years ago, when INDUSTRIA was a third-person, Silent Hill-ish game with a completely different story:


This screenshot is literally 5 years old now!

As the concept changed from a third- to a first-person perspective game, we once again changed the building system, since the old one was not made for players being that close to the geometry and textures:


Without textures


With textures (and where it gets problematic)

Back then we were really proud of this system. The process to produce it was a pain though. This was before the now industry standard texturing software Substance painter (basically used in every single AAA production nowadays) was a thing. Being a modular system consisting of manny single pieces, its textures had to be seamless wherever two, or even four pieces met. As I was texturing all this manuly in Photoshop CS6 back then, it was a huge task to create a unique textures for each piece that would be seamless in every possible combination. We scraped it once again (yes, scrapping weeks of work, welcome to game development).

That was when we decided to do something similar, a modular system, but with simpler pieces that would be textured in Unreal Engine 4 with a world-tiling material. This fixed the seam problem and we built the game as you know it with this new approach:


Good variety in shapes, but as you can see, the textures are pretty boring

A solid system. But it was two weak points: performance and the lack of texture fidelity. See, in game engines, every single object has to be handled by your GPU. The more objects, the more work for your computer. We call these draw calls. Every material is an extra draw call. This means, a building in our city that consists of 50 objects could easily go over 100 draw calls. Just one building. Now imagine a whole city. But thats not where it stops, the worst part is, that it all looks kind of- boring. No unique weathering effects, always just tiling textures all over the buildings. We had to change the approach once again, as painful this process already was, and even if that would mean to redo alot levels...

THE SOLUTION

So what we needed was less draw calls (better performance) as well as beautiful looking buildings that look old and weathered. First, draw calls need to be reduced, so I built just one object, handled as just one draw call in engine. Secondly, textures would be made with Substance (the texturing software I talked about before). The Substance workflow is based on building a high detailed version of your object, in this case a complete building, and in a process called „normal baking“ transfer this high detail information onto the low detailed version of the building. It will look high detailed when light hits the surfaces, although the model is not at all this detailed, saving polygons and with that valuable performance. This is called „High to Low-poly (poly = polygon) baking“ and got established as a very common workflow in the games industry. The result, I believe, speaks for itself:


Remember, this is just one model, copied three times! Imagine what we can do with a few different ones of them plus extra decoration like posters, street lamps etc.


Even up close, we have high res detail

The buildings are now quicker to process for your GPU, they look more interesting and on top of that I can create as manny texture variants as I want really damn quick, a win-win-win. Here is the reference photo I used here and which I took on a trip to Prague:


The reference photo I took in Prague, what a beautiful city

Prague has just absolutely beautiful buildings, as the patina on the plaster just comes up with amazing color tones. I will use the Prague reference photos I made as close reference for the cities look, so expect some Prague-ish steampunk city in the final game.

CONCLUSION

So what did we learned? Alot! Redoing systems like this numerous times is incredibly valuable, and I am sure even the solution is not the best way of tackling this. I looked at games like Dishonored 2 and its approach. Their buidlings are absolutely gorgeous, being huge and still having all that sweet dirt/weathering detail. From what I know, they use a mixture of a tiling base texture, and layered details on top. For a huge game like Dishonored, this means good flexibility when building dozens of levels. As we are just two guys designing and building the city, we have to find our own workflow, for a smaller game with less manpower and money behind.

I recommend to try things out and afterwards, not to be afraid of scrapping them, even if you worked x amount of time on it. Its all a big learning curve in the end. Yes, you have to call it a day at some point, but try to improve as long as you can, it will be worth it!

Thats it for this blog entry, thank you alot for reading and supporting this project!

Best wishes and stay healthy,
David

Fellow Industrians!

Today we present you the last of the three teasers. Enjoy the ride, as it will be quite a surreal ride for sure:



Best wishes,
David

Hello Industrians!

Just a quick update: today we want to share a new Teaser with you! Its not yet viewable on the Shop Page, but will be soon. Tomorrow, another Teaser will follow.



All the best from the Team!
-David (Co-founder Bleakmill Games & 3D Artist)

We did it! After 3 years we managed to create this Steam page. And you know what? It feels absolutely incredible.

Where to start? In january 2017, my colleague and over the years grown friend Steve and me, David, decided to do our own little game. Since I live in Berlin, Germany, and he in the UK, we decided to meet up the first time ever (we only knew each other through the internet). So I booked the flight and visited him in his hometown in Wales. After years of just hearing our voices through Skype, we saw each other in person on the airport. That was one crazy experience. Face to face is a whole other level as you can imagine.

I spent a few days at his place and we quickly concepted the first level of our little project. That was the begining of what you now can see here. And here we are, 3 years later, and I'm talking to you through the Steam Community Hub. It's still surreal and at the same time incredibly exciting to see the game on this platform...

Throughout the next updates I want to take you back in time, show you the first little drawings we made and comparison screenshots from the levels how they look 3 years later. We are deeply thankful for all the people that already wishlisted INDUSTRIA or follow the development. We also welcome anyone new. I promise, this journey is not yet over and I want you to join the heart warming family of fellow Industrians!

Meanwhile, enjoy the Teaser you probably already saw, but on YouTube and in better quality:



Also, if you want to chat with us and meet other community members, feel free to join our little Discord Server .

We wish everyone a wonderful evening. This is a new chapter and we can't wait to begin it!

With love,
David & Steve from the Bleakmill Team