Monday 1 December 2014

Lights, Crystals, Water and Grass

Nothing encourages me (and my team) more than seeing promising results; and the most recent build of my prototype has been pretty awesome.  It's starting to look like a video game despite having practically nothing in it yet.  It's pretty much all about the environments still and it will continue to be for a few more months.

- added the possibility for multiple alternate paths throughout the environments.
- more lighting adjustments.
- added environmental decorations such as crystals, water and grass.
- more graphical and scripting optimization.














Optimization and bug fixes as been my focus for some time, now.  Large dungeon layouts take roughly a full minute to generate (which is a major improvement) and there are performance dips that occur in certain areas.  I'm starting to see what's causing these dips and finding solutions has been pretty entertaining despite being a destractions from my current priorities.

Right now we're pretty dedicated in adding more and more art assets to make it feel more organic while, at the same time, I'm trying to keep everything as lightweight as possible for a stable performance.  It's essential that my environments run as smooth as possible before I start to inject gameplay elements to them.

I'm at a point where, on the programming side, I'm only doing a few things here and here.  Mostly adjusting variables and fixing a few bugs and coding oversights.  The code is more or less ready (for a prototype) so I can allow myself to take some time and make everything look pretty.

The question to how we're going to procedurally light an envionrment has more or less been figured out and it'll be interesting to see how (well) these solutions.  Our glowing crystals coupled with lights shining from large holes in the ceiling already shows us a glimpse of what can be done.  Regardless of how we're going to light everything, there's still the issue of balancing the areas so that they remain somewhat forboding.

I've noticed that finding the various paths in the dark have been somewhat difficult without following a particular wall.  As an artist, that's an appealing challenge to have.

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