*Last Needed Animation

Up until now I was using a death animation found in a free asset pack:

It isn't great by any strech of imagination, but it's all that I had. I'm no animator but i decided to set my self a goal. That if I get my project to a almost complete state I would attempt more animations, so here I go.

Heres Harry's death animation from Silent Hill:

It's very fluid and looks great! It almost looks like mocap was used.
Next I did what I have with other animations and used this original as a reference:

It still isn't fantastic, but... its much much closer to the death animation I want than the weird roundhouse death in the first gif. His limbs and torse follow the original as close as possible, it's little things like the odd jiggle here and there that really make the original look realisitc.

All together it now looks like this ingame:

Apologies for how dark it was, but that's how the scene is suppose to be. But you can see just how much of a difference it makes, even without as fluid animation as he originally did.

I still hate animating a lot! But I think I am getting slightly better at it!

*I'm still debating whether or not to try animating the Café cutscene again, but that is the last animation if I do. This death animation was the last required animation.

Silent Hill Remake Rumour

Recently there have been rumours surround two new Silent Hill games. One of which just so happens to be exactly what I'm doing, a Silent Hill 1 remake!

It's quite an amusing coincidence to say the least, these rumours have however been rejected by Konami. But that is to be expected.

At anyrate, it will be interesting if it is true, because it will make a great case study to evaluate and compare design choices over my own.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-01-26-report-konami-has-two-new-silent-hill-games-in-development

Updating Custom Tool

While doing more play testing and comparison I noticed that my tool for interacting with objects wasn't complete! I've updated it now to include sounds, which I presume finishes it until I find something new to add.

In the above video you can see that sounds are now easily integrated. This isn't used a great deal, but it can come in handy for the odd line of dialouge too.

I've worked on this script for months now, I'm very pleased with how its progressed and just how much easier it makes adding things to the game. This would be an invalueable tool if this was a full scale project.

I think with a bit more tweaking and flushing out I could actually sell this asset on the Unity Store!

Cutscene Problems

As part of adding finishing touches, I've decided to try include all my planned cutscenes to really mimic the original game. Though after a lot of testing I'm still having issues.
I have a total of 5 cutscenes in this little project, so far only 2 of these work how I would like them to. This is both due to my skill set and engine limitations, for example the biggest issue I'm having by far is actor postitioning and rotation.
While recording movements I can place the player in a starting position and give them a direction to move in. If I add rotation this then originates any recordings to 0,0,0 and I have to re-record placement. Which then will ignore any rotation I've done. So unless I need a straight line following then this is unfeasible and would require manual animation in Max.

On top of this, many, many times will it bug out and cause the player to go flying off screen and fall forever!

As you can see here, the first half of the video shows the player dissapear and it's gizmo can be seen way off into the distance. Then the second half shows how it should look.

So, as it stands 2/5 work fine. I'm working on a third now which is challenging and I'm having to alternate it from the original game, just to make it work and feel right in this project. So while the scene isnt exactly 1:1 it still conveys exactly the same, it's just not animated at all, so it's now more gameplay.
After this the fourth is a simple camera swap, but it's on an angle so as mentioned before the rotation doesnt work. So I will have to change this a little.

The final cutscene is the very lenghty conversation in the diner after Harry wakes up. This I'm afraid may have to be missed completely. It's out of my skill range to re-animate this frame for frame and is very time consuming. Time better spend on polish.

Current To-Do List

Throughout development I've been keeping a little to-do txt document up to date with current needs of the project. After battling through this and the many issues it had I've managed to dwindle it down to the last key items. As a result of this, the project is now fully playable from start to finish in regards to my initial outline, it just needs little things finishing and polishing up!

Here is my current To-Do List as of this post:

Alley A

• Add new fence / blockade after entering Alley B and returning.
• Replace Old for New Snow.

Alley B Hell

• Fix Corpse Cutscene Trigger.
• Create Textures for Wall, Wheelchair and floor.
• Replace Old for New Snow.
• Consider re-doing cutscene to match original better with extra cams.
• Fix Death Animation.
• User CamMerge to Slerp arm / lighter movement.
• *Bug: Children wont hit twice if player never leaves their collider...

CAFE

• Replace Old for New Snow.
• Model & Texture TV / Wooden Cabinet.
• Add flying monster and camera after picking up Map.
• Add Game End when Radio is picked up and glass is smashed!

SILENT HILL

• Improve and Rig Cheryl Model.
• Second Cutscene.
• Third Cutscene.
• Gate Camera Trigger.
• Finish top priority models:
• Apartments,
• Crab Shop,
• Garage Style D & E,
• End of Alley Wall,
• Misc props: Traffic Lights, signs, fire hydrants etc.

OVERALL MISC (not important)

• Figure out how to disable inputs
• Add Spawn location on scene loading

It may seem like a lot, but this is nothing, especially considering I've built a game from the ground up including; coding, modeling, design, animating, sound editing etc.

Once all the above points have been rectified I will be able to record and present a final playthrough of the project.

Small Visual Update

Work is progressing slower now, since it's all modelling now. But here is a small comparison image to show mine against the original.

This is a real simple scene to show-off, but you can see the model & texture improvements overall! To be fair the upper image should be worse seeing how its being rendered with my updated effects and post, which wasn't present in the original. Though the asset difference is the point of this comparison!

Updates for a while may be few and far between, simply just because it is entirely modelling work now.

Better Effects!

One thing that's been needing attention for a while is environmental effects aka particle effects. These really help make a believeable world. Looking at Silent Hill, the only effect used is snow, there is a debate on a few fourms as to wheter or not it's ash. But most conclude it is actually snow.
Well there are more effects obviously; such as rain, but snow its the be all and end all as far cinching the aesthetic for Silent Hill goes.

Up umtil now I've just be used a defualt particle effect (pretty much a circle with a faded edge). This works ok, but because the particle system follows the player, many times particles pass directly in front of the view. When this happens, its easy to notice how bland they look.
So, I decided to improve this effect. I found a image of a few snowflakes online, which I previously used when I first began the project:

Obviously it doesnt have a grey background, I added this to make it visible on here!
At any rate, when using this in a particle system it spawns this whole image for every particle emission, so they quite clearly look like whole sheets falling (this would actually be fine for out of inaccessible areas).
So instead after a bit of tweaking, I took this image and made my own 128x128 sprite sheet:

I just randomly cut 25 flakes from the first image and placed them in a grid with a transparent background.
Then in Unity, I told the particle system to use each sprite from this sheet randomly, creating a much better effect.

There is now more visible variation between particles! I could add more by increasing the new sprite sheet size, but I think it looks much better.

In addition to snow, I also looked into other Silent Hill games to see if / what effects they incorperate. It turns out in the more modern entries to the franchise they started using rolling fog. So in addition to the height distance fog I have implemented, I have now also included fog similar to the newer games.

I included a screenshot from in-editor, because the effect is ever so slight that ingame you don't notice it much unless you know it's there!