Greetings, fellow Unity developers! We are Camouflaj, a game studio based near Seattle, WA. We are the folks behind République, an episodic stealth action game about governmental surveillance. To date, we’ve shipped three episodes (of five) to an overwhelmingly positive reception.

Back in 2012, we promised to make a “true” PC & Mac version of République that was in no way a simple mobile port. We spent countless hours thinking and experimenting with ways to make our upcoming PC & Mac release all the more special.

Soon after Unity 5 was announced, the team started dreaming up ways we could use that new technology to make a big splash on PC. We wanted to totally remaster the game in Unity 5.

That’s when we approached Unity with a proposal: in exchange for early access to Unity 5’s alpha and beta releases, why doesn’t the Camouflaj team document their journey from Unity 4 to Unity 5? We’d love to leverage République as a standout title on Unity 5, and share the story of our development with the public so they can learn from our successes and failures. Thankfully, the folks at Unity said yes.

Today we are proud to share the developer diary about our journey to remaster Republique in Unity 5!

Each of the five episodes from our dev diary includes a video and a podcast. Ultimately, our modest hope is that our “journey” series is helpful to you.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of what we cover:

Dev diary 1: République enters the Next Gen

Why we are using Unity 5 to take Republique to PC

Dev diary 2: République Migrates From Unity 4

We’ll explain how we moved our project from Unity 4 to Unity 5 in the midst of a chaotic, 20-person project, starting with our initial investigation.

Dev diary 3: République in Physically Based Shading

This is the really exciting stuff. We’ll go over a little bit of Physically Based Shading for the uninitiated, and explain how we put this to work in our game.

Dev diary 4: République Lighting & More

We’ll walk you through how we made use of Reflection Probes, Global Illumination, cookies and other good stuff, plus we’ll cover some physics and animation refinements.

Dev diary 5: République Ships on Unity 5

We’ll document our push to launch, and how we optimized and (fingers crossed) shipped a fantastic game.

Thank you for taking this journey with us!

-Camouflaj