Blog

Working on environments

Hello everyone! I’m still hard at work on the game’s environments and things are moving forward smoothly, although it’s quite intense; balancing artistic ambitions with gameplay layout and technical feasibility…

While I was going through my stash of screenshots I found some old ones (well they’re from last year) and it was quite the eye-opener to see how far the project has come.

Here’s an example with the keep’s courtyard you get to explore when you escape the jail (I hope I don’t need to tell you which one’s the new screenshot 🙂 ):

Of course on those screenshots the camera angle is not quite the same but still it’s close enough to measure the overall progress.

I have a feeling the contrast provided between dark environments and sun-drenched ones is going to be pretty effective. I’ve been experimenting with so-called “God Rays” (rays of light catching particles in suspension in the air) and I think I’m getting close.

It’s really neat walking through patches of light this way; it certain adds a dramatic flair to some locations. When in motion you can even see fine particles of dust moving across.

After I’m done with the current task of doing a first pass on most of the environments it will be time to test streaming solutions to load locations as needed. This is something that’s a bit scary because it needs to work perfectly in order to avoid stuttering framerates and maintain a smooth experience.

I’m also looking forward to tweaking and improving the animations; Unity 5.0 brings a lot of new features for refined control over animation states.

On a different topic Paul and I recently talked a lot about gameplay interactions based on Tilo’s lute. It’s not implemented yet but we’re both very happy with the direction it’s taken. I’ll probably go more into details about that in a future update.

Anyway, back to work now! 😛