May 2025: Animation breakthrough!

Hey, friend!

Thanks for stopping by our dev blog, I am glad to have you here!

In this update, I’ll be sharing how we’re bringing Oliver’s expressions to life with facial animation, plus a peek into how we’re crafting textures and lighting to make our levels shine (sometimes literally). And that’s not all!

There’s more behind-the-scenes goodness inside. Let’s dive in!

Oliver is alive!

Let me be completely honest with you...When our cinematic designer first pitched the idea of giving Oliver a full facial rig, I was very skeptical. I mean - come on... a tiny team... working after hours, pulling off facial animation with actual acting? Yeah, right.

But here we are! Thanks to a trusty phone camera and a bit of creative hacking, we’ve cobbled together our own homebrewed performance capture pipeline, and it’s actually working!

This is first test of performance caprure for Oliver, our animator recorded himself and amanage to transfer theat to actual game rig! 🤯

Next level texturing!

Last month, I mentioned we were switching our pipeline over to Blender... Well, good news: it’s working beautifully!

I’ve set up a seamless system where tweaks I make in Blender materials transfer straight into Unity with just one click. No more back-and-forth chaos.. just fast, smooth, gorgeous results for our level art!

And it’s not just the pipeline that’s looking good — we’ve also cooked up three brand-new procedural materials in Substance Designer!

Rust, Moss, and Metal trim.

Our master shader got a serious upgrade too!

It now supports height-based blending across three layers and color remapping for each one - giving us incredible flexibility to fine-tune the look of every surface in the world. Texturing our environments has never been this powerful (or fun)!

Dont forget to click play ☝️

Meet Stabber!

This little maniac is the newest recruit in the Ashborn faction - a fearless infiltrator with a wild streak and zero chill.

Small in size, big on chaos. You’ll know when he’s around...

Oh, and he’s not just for show — Stabber’s already got gameplay hooks!

He’s aggressive, relentless, and has one goal: hunt down Oliver and take him out.

Better keep your distance… or don’t. He loves a chase.

As a cherry on top we have the new model of the staff ofr Mithras, the guadian of Electrum.

That’s it for this update - from facial animation breakthroughs to smarter shaders and a stabby little menace joining the chaos, we’ve been busy!

Thanks for following our journey as we keep tinkering away on Oliver’s Tale.

As always, your support means the world. More surprises coming soon, stay tuned!