Screenshot Saturday 159
This week I overhauled the menu. It’s very Valve-ish now:
I also distributed a number of mysterious notes around the levels to help flesh out the back story. They’re actual 3D objects rendered and lit in the game world.
WHAT COULD IT MEAN? THIS REVELATORY NOTE HAS ADDED HEFTY NUANCE TO THE PLOT AND SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED MY IMMERSION IN THE STORY.
Other than that, just lots of level design iteration, scripting, and tweaking.
I’ve also implemented the first bit of non-linear storyline, which actually turned out pretty well. Looking to do much more non-linear stuff in the future.
I thought the very first section of the game was a bit frustrating with all the platform jumping right off the bat, so I simplified it a bit:
Screenshot Saturday 160
This week I finally fixed my water code to allow finite bodies of water like this:
(It’s so dark because I still have a pesky rendering bug)
I also realized I accidentally had pre-multiplied alpha turned on for my cloud texture. Here’s what it looks like when you use pre-multiplied alpha incorrectly:
And here it is fixed (I also made the clouds fade in over distant objects):
I finally fixed a long-standing bug which caused shadows to get really shaky when the camera was far from the origin due to floating-point errors. I fixed it by rendering everything as if the camera is at the origin. Here it is before. And after (I also switched from back-facing shadow maps to front-facing).
I also did a ton of level design and minor tweaks like making the game pause when you alt-tab away from it, but that’s boring stuff. Here’s something cool, I totally rewrote the orb enemy to be much scarier. It jumps around all over the place now and is super dangerous.
That’s it for this week these two weeks. Thanks for reading!
The game looks a lot better in motion.