Piotr Turecki and Marcin Turecki are building a great looking game about the beauty of light.
Archaica: The Path Of Light is a first game coming from a tiny 2-person team TwoMammoths. Piotr Turecki is a programmer, and his brother Marcin Turecki is an artist. There are a couple of other people, who helped with the sounds/music, story, translations, but the core team is very small. For a debut title, Archaica looks absolutely amazing.
It’s a puzzle game with lasers and mirrors with a storyline and beautiful graphics. The main mechanics is pretty easy: you turn the crystals and use various mechanisms to make the laser lights move through the level. The game has a very rich world, which contains six realms, each with a unique graphics and type of puzzles.
Height ambient (two colors interpolated by scene height)
Shadow color (fake secondary diffuse term). Takes into account scene height and normal (and it’s also colorized)
SSAO (not optimal, and not very fast, and even not very good ;P – but works well so far)
And the last component: secondary directional light without shadows (fake simulation of the reflected light)
Direct lighting looks like this
Final result.
The development started way before Unreal Engine 4 was free, so Piotr Turecki decided to build his own custom engine to power the project. He definitely succeeded. Archaica looks absolutely amazing. Yet, if he’d start doing this today, he’d go with UE4.
The whole development of the project was well-documented and published on TIGsource. It’s a beautiful title and we can’t wait to play it in 2017.