Dungeons of Hinterberg: Shaders, Gameplay & More

Introduction

80.lv: Please introduce yourself and your team. What projects have you contributed to? What companies have you worked for? How did you team up?

Regina Resigner, Co-Founder, 3D Artist: Hello, we are Regina Reisinger and Philipp Seifried. We founded the indie game studio Microbird last year and are currently working on our first game, “Dungeons of Hinterberg”.

We have both been working in the games industry for many years. I am mainly a 3D Artist and Philipp is a developer and game designer. I’ve worked for various studios in Germany and Austria over the years, with projects ranging from AA RPGs to mobile games and VR games, some with realistic graphics, others much more stylized and lowpoly. I consider myself a generalist and I also have some experience doing 2D art and VFX, as well as game design.

Philipp Seifried, Co-Founder: I’ve been working on games for about 15 years, most frequently as a programmer and game designer, but I’ve also spent a year as a writer and two years making an indie game as a one-man-band.

Among the games we had recently enjoyed playing were both “Zelda: Breath Of The Wild” and “Persona 5”, and we thought: why not combine the Action Adventure elements like combat and puzzles with the social aspects of Persona, and put it into a charming and unusual setting that we know very well? This is how the concept of “Dungeons of Hinterberg” was born.

80.lv: What games, books, films, animated series affected your style and inspired you?

Regina Resigner: Art-style was always something very central to us with this project. We are making an indie game, which means that a unique and recognizable style can be really important and helpful, but we are also both very visual people who are interested in stylized art in general. A lot of our inspiration for Hinterberg comes from outside of games: we studied illustrators like Jon Juarez or Pierre-Abraham Rochat, in terms of VFX we took a lot of inspiration from “Into the Spiderverse”, and we bought and read many graphic novels during our early days of working on the game.

Gameplay

80.lv: Could you discuss gameplay mechanics? The game mixes fun combat and sim elements. How did you find the right balance?

Regina Resigner: Dungeons of Hinterberg is set in a modern-day village in the Austrian Alps, where a big tourism industry has sprung up: people from all over the world come to explore the magical, monster-filled dungeons surrounding the village. As a player, your in-game days are spent exploring dungeons, battling monsters & solving puzzles, whereas your evenings can be used to socialize with locals and tourists, hang out at a local café or have a beer at the Après Slay bar.

It’s very important for us to connect both parts in a meaningful way and have them affect each other: Improving your relationships can, for example, unlock parts of your skill tree or provide you with valuable items, or might give you relevant info or tips, thus putting you in a better position for continuing your exploration the next day.

80.lv: Could you also discuss the sim part?

Regina Resigner: “Persona 5”, “Animal Crossing” and “Hades” are favorites of ours that we look to when working on the social simulation part.

As you get to know other characters, you will learn their history, likes, and dislikes, and will find ways to help each other out. The relationships you build can unlock abilities in your skill-tree, give you access to key items, or simply provide you with important information like the location of a secret backdoor to an otherwise daunting dungeon.

We also see the characters and the locations in the village as a way for us to tell a story and to bring across the local flair and some of the customs and characteristics of the alpine region that the game is set in.

80.lv: Could you also discuss the sim part?

Regina Resigner: “Persona 5”, “Animal Crossing” and “Hades” are favorites of ours that we look to when working on the social simulation part.

As you get to know other characters, you will learn their history, likes, and dislikes, and will find ways to help each other out. The relationships you build can unlock abilities in your skill-tree, give you access to key items, or simply provide you with important information like the location of a secret backdoor to an otherwise daunting dungeon.

We also see the characters and the locations in the village as a way for us to tell a story and to bring across the local flair and some of the customs and characteristics of the alpine region that the game is set in.

The World

80.lv: The game is set in a truly beautiful world. Could you tell us about it?

Regina Resigner: We chose to have the game take place in our home country, mainly because we think the European Alps offer unique locations and stunning landscapes that have hardly been represented in games and thus provide a fresh setting for players to explore.

We sometimes reference “Breath of the Wild” when talking about our inspirations, but considering that we are a small team making an indie title, our goal is not to build an open-world game with huge environments. We want to have a few smaller, yet visually distinct environments in the game, that the player can travel to, explore, and find the dungeon entrances there. It’s important to us to make a curated, unique experience, so we are not using procedural dungeon creation, but we use a lot of smaller tools to help us speed up our workflow. 

The village locations are all modeled by hand, with a lot of focus on color and lighting, to convey the right mood. When developing our style, one of our goals was to be able to produce assets efficiently and quickly with a small team.

Especially for environments, our style allows us to use some assets without textures altogether, saving us the work on UV layouts. For a lot of other assets, we use Substance Designer to create tileable normal maps. Our rendering pipeline takes it from there and converts normals into colored lines reminiscent of hand-drawn detail from comics or illustrations. 

Rendering

80.lv: Could you share some details on your technical solutions about stylized rendering? How did you make it work?

Philipp Seifried: We use Unity’s built-in render pipeline, but with a custom-built deferred shading setup. In deferred shading, you render information about your surfaces, such as their albedo, glossiness, or normals, into different textures and then light and shade the image later. Aside from all the usual information that ends up in these textures, which are collectively called a gBuffer, we also write a material ID into one of the channels.

On the GPU, we have a buffer with all kinds of material properties associated with these IDs, things like what types of outlines we want different materials to have, their BRDFs, or whether or not they should have fresnel. We basically have an entire second material system that we can access during the lighting stage, or in post-processing effects.

So the lighting pass, outline system, post FX, transparent VFX, etc. all know much more about the pixels they're working with than they would with a regular gBuffer. For example, post-processing effects can include/exclude specific materials or use different colors per material.

We also have four different outline types, which we can turn on or off per material. We can also assign different colors, widths, and other properties to these different outline types on a per-material basis.

All of this isn’t easy to wrangle, but it gives us great artistic control. Abilities like tinting our toon ramps for different materials play a huge part in our art style and help us stand out among other cel-shaded games.

Future Plans

80.lv: What are your plans now? When can we expect to play the game? 

Regina Resigner: We are still rather early in development, currently we are finishing up work on our first playable prototype, which was funded by an Austrian government grant. Beyond that, we’re currently looking to secure a publishing deal, as well as funding for the rest of the game’s development. We were lucky enough that our initial social media posts attracted a lot of attention and the interest of quite a few publishers, well ahead of our schedule.

Our plan for the future is to hire 2 or 3 additional people to grow the team a bit, preferably people who also bring experience in more than one field with them.

It’s still early to say for sure, but we hope that the game will be released in late 2022 or early 2023. For people who would like to follow the development of the game, we post a lot of updates and short videos on our Twitter, or people can sign up for our newsletter on our website.

Regina Resigner and Philipp Seifried, Founders of Microbird Games

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev