《Drifting : Weight of Feathers》is a third-person shooter-action game. The combat system revolves around air-to-ground, air-to-air shooting and traversing. Each encounter in the game challenges the player to develop a situational awareness in 3D space, which includes constantly prioritizing your target whilst observing the surroundings to find out the key to advance to the next stage.
A glimpse of combat in 《Drifting》
Interact UI
The ability to grab and throw enemy/object plays a crucial part of the game mechanics, from the past feedbacks I received, the game did not make it clear when to grab and when enemies become resistant to grab.
Before the improvement, I used a fresnel effect to hint at grab-prone enemy, the emissive fresnel effect works well in most cases, however, in far distance, the emissive color will be averaged out by temporal anti-aliasing which renders it indiscernible for long-range grab; to make matter worse, after adding particles, decals, destructible meshes...into my game, it's quite difficult to noticed the fresnel effect when there are so many things going on at once.
After some contemplation, I decided to use post-process outline to replace the fresnel effect, the outline effect is not affected by TAA as much as the emissive fresnel shader does; and since it's rendered in custom depth pass, I don't have to worry about other particle or mesh occluding the effect; Additionally, I made a circular counter to indicate the time left before the enemy become resistant to grab (the time before its armor regenerates) - an important piece of information that did not reveal to players previously.
The interact UI still needs a lot of tuning and testing before it can do its job properly, however, I believe these changes will help players to get a grasp of the game's mechanics more easily.
I hope you enjoy this week's update, have a nice weekend! :3