How German can you get?

😞

@marioprime.bsky.social, saw Hinterberg on your stream this weekend.
Don't know if this has been on your radar, but we just released a free DLC on every platform (including Playstation which launched an hour ago) that lets you play a prequel as Renaud, i.e. the guy who "looks like Blade" :)

[1/12] A few learnings from the savegame system for "Dungeons of Hinterberg". Saving/loading any complex game state is always a hard problem, and backtracking to fix a broken system late in the project is even harder, so hopefully these pointers can help someone:

Seeing your game in a print magazine is always a special feeling. Even more so if it's in a magazine all the way from Japan! Thanks, @famitsucom.bsky.social !

The idea being that if the level geometry changes, these few extra maps either won't change, or they're very quick to re-author. The final export always comes out of "Material Maker". [7/8]

We also have a few extra maps that we create manually in Photoshop: "Roads" lets us draw simple roads which are then colored and outlined. "Overlays" lets us add stuff on top of the map (such as arrows). There's also a map that we can use to kill contour lines whereever its alpha is non-zero. [6/8]

Our rendering tech also lets us render out material IDs. This comes in handy here, because it lets us extract every water surface and treat it differently from the rest. [5/8]

The basics are what you'd expect: we use height maps for contour lines and height-based color grading (mixed with a bit of albedo). There's some ambient occlusion in there as well, based on the height data. And we use the normal map to do a bit of directional lighting. [4/8]

Here's part of our graph for the "Doberkogel" biome. It's a big pile of spaghetti, so I'm not going to dissect it in every detail... [3/8]

So here's a short thread about how we created the overworld maps in "Dungeons of Hinterberg". We're a small team, so we needed a setup where the level design could still change, without us having to spend a ton of resources on reworking the maps manually. [1/8]

Hi, I'm Philipp! I co-founded @microbirdgames.bsky.social with @reginatown.bsky.social, wrote our rendering tech for Dungeons of Hinterberg, designed a few of our dungeons, wrote most of the dialogue and made our cash flow spreadsheet. Hoping to talk a bit more about the dev side of things here. :)