People seem to be enjoying the intro cutscene in The Ultimate Martian Roulette. Figured I could point you to a couple of resources that helped me wrap my head around the topic, in case that's something you'd be interested in for your projects.

We used the tools provided out-of-the-box by Unity, as packages you have to install in the project - Cinemachine and Timeline. The former dealing with camerawork, and the latter - allowing you to record animations and organize them in sequences.

Here are two links to get you started with those features (I think the previews are broken, so just click the icons in the bottom right): - Using Cinemachine: Track & Dolly - part 2 of the Cinemachine tutorial, most relevant for our case: link - Using Timeline (playlist) - to get the hang of the basic usage of the tool: link

With that out of the way, the setup for the cutscene is rather simple: - it's 4 dolly tracks, defining paths for the camera, - and a timeline animating the camera position on each of the tracks, and switching between different shots.

It takes a while to get comfortable with the tools but ultimately - it's not really difficult to get them to work, and then you're free to spend hours on tweaking camera positions and timings :sweat_smile:

Here are a couple of screenshots of the dolly tracks we ended up with:

And the timeline itself - the top track for switching between shots, and 4 tracks animating dolly positions.

That's pretty much it, I hope it'll serve you as a starting point. Happy directing!

As a bonus, here's my go-to video when it comes to implementing subtitles, be sure to check it out if that's something you're doing: link

Hey, just wanted to say that we really appreciate the feedback we got for The Ultimate Martian Roulette throughout the last couple of days <3

Here's a little look behind the scenes - the game at different stages of development.

End of day 1:

End of day 2:

End of day 3:

We ended up cutting a lot of ideas and corners, but we're still happy with the result. Deciding what NOT to do is gamedev's bread and butter after all. And it does often hold hidden opportunities (ragdolls 2.0?).

Anyway, fun times.

Btw check out our Getting started with cutscenes in Unity post if that's something that might be up your alley.

https://youtu.be/HRDp1Pwv6yE

Finally managed to sit down and glue together all video material of work-in-progress Void Timeline we gathered during the jam. Enjoy!

I was surprised as to how easy the recording part ended up being. Turns out Unity offers a recoder package, and it seems to work pretty well, for what we used it for at least.

Aside from a manually-controlled recorder window, the package includes scripting samples. You can use those to set up your own recording behaviour from code. Together with InitializeOnLoadAttribute and playModeStateChanged event - recording can be automatically triggered every time you enter play mode.

I was able to record to an MP4 format in a high(-ish) quality basically at all times, without performance issues (though capped at 60 fps). The original video came out better than the youtube version, which really hit the sped-up FXes with compression artifacts.

Here's the best part though - I could work normally in the editor, with the game relegated to its usual, non-maximized viewport - while still recording at the target resolution of 1080p! This alone made the whole effort worthwhile to me.

In general I can recommend looking into this package, if you're capturing footage of your game for any purpose.

PS Apply CursorMode.ForceSoftware while recording in the editor, if you want the cursor to be registered as well.

In regular Hivesters gameplay you control up to a couple hundred hungry insects.

However, we made this system to support as many units as possible. We ended up not knowing exactly how performant it is, so we went back and checked.

Turns out, it holds its own pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEQuMDcNVVQ

Thanks for playing Hivesters :bug::bug::bug:

Well then, we are most definitely in. In the meantime we were revisiting our previous attempts, trying to figure out how to achieve a proper jam-rest balance. Not overscoping would probably be a good idea to start with.

Anyways, last time we really did overscope a bit. It was also the second time we recorded our progress throughout the whole jam. Here's how our LD52 game evolved over the 72 hours:

https://youtu.be/hvgtBaP8fzY

I made static character meshes breathe using a component intended for pulsing UI elements, and there was nothing you could do to stop me.

The droughts got slightly worse too.

Not every follow-up is worth following-up on.

...and if you ever need to train for delivering news irl - the game's right here for you to go back to.

LD55 will be our sixth consecutive entry as Tano Collective and marks our second anniversary of jamming together.

Let’s have a good one!

There's grass in space and it needs cutting...