OtherSide Entertainment have been exploring the possibilities of Unity 5 recently, and their latest Kickstarter update tells of a couple of the more interesting things they have discovered/developed with it.

So, for example, there will be traps in Underworld Ascendant:

This week Tim has been building deathtraps that are all physics controlled. What does that mean? Well, in most games a trap is built and it has some script behind it. Enter this trigger and it goes off. In our world weight and mass matter. For example if we had a trap with a pressure plate not only would a player stepping on it make it go off, but throwing a large object of sufficient weight would set it off, or applying enough pressure would also set it off.

Obviously in this simple version this creates different ways of dealing with the trap beyond just disabling it. You could Indiana Jones the trap by pushing on the pressure plate with a torch or the classic 10’ pole.

Another example which Tim already built which is my favorite is a spring loaded trap. Watch a video of it in action HERE.

But the image at the top of this post isn’t of traps. The image at the top of this post is of textures. This part is really cool:

Will has been playing in Unity 5.0 too. Specifically, he’s been messing around with the new lighting, which is pretty powerful, and PBR textures.

What is a PBR texture? No it does not stand for ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon’.

…

…That rock texture-and the bricks behind it is all flat really. But this technology adds depth, lighting, occlusion, specularity and all the other stuff normal maps do. What I see is depth. Serious depth. When the lighting is right, these textures totally ‘pop’ in the game. A big thanks goes out to gametextures.com for being ahead of the curve on these things and having a nice library for us indie game designers to work with. Check them out if you are into building worlds.

The Unity 5.0 lighting model we are just cracking the surface on. Physical Shaders- which in theory will mean we use one global shader for the game, or at least a good chunk of it. Global lighting- which in a nutshell is to calculate lighting not just from light sources, but also from reflections off of surfaces.

I’ve been messing around with shaders in Unity over the last few months, and I have to say: the results above are just jaw-droppingly good. If this is a technology that OtherSide are able to deploy consistently throughout Underworld Ascendant, the game will be both highly performant on even middling hardware, but also strikingly gorgeous.