Volumetric Portal Door (And So Much More)

Volume Lighting

This week, I cleaned a lot of the map up while adding in extra little touches. The largest change would be that I added in volumetric lighting to the scene, which did a lot for it.

Plants

I used polybrush to paint the flowers across the outside of the map, rather than quickly and arbitrarily placing them. After doing so, the coloring on them felt too sporadic, so I decided to try to place them all within the red to yellow range, giving the scene a far more connected feel than before. This also allowed the green fog to stand out more clearly in contrast to the other colors (despite the fact that the ground beneath the flowers is also green, from the point of view that can be seen from the map, it contrasts against the sky) communicating better to the player that they should not go outside of the map.

Main Menu

I made adjustments to the main menu to make it feel more dynamic, 3D, and less like it was made for an 80s special on the BBC. I still hope to make some more quick adjustments over the next few days, but it is far better than it had been prior. (I had forgotten to put it down on my post from last week, but here it was before:

And here it is after:

(It is difficult to tell since the gif lowered much of the quality, but there are now three layers of paralax)

Spaceship Interior

The entire map is designed to encircle the ship. Therefore, by the time they would get to the bottom area, playtesters would get so upset about not being able to enter that they would actually put down the controller and stop playing. Unfortunately, due to concerns about time, it had been scrapped earlier in the project. However, the need became clear to add it back in. As there were a lot of major projects that had to be given in this week, and we ran into a lot of small bugs that needed to be fixed so I could not get it completely finished.

Unfortunately, the metrics for the inside of the ship had been only slightly taken into account, which means that it is impossible to implement much of the designs I had come up with earlier in the year. Still, I was able to make it functional, and I have a lot of alternate ideas on making it look good over the weekend. Once that is done, I will be able to work purely on polishing the game more.

I have complete faith that I will be able to complete the task, but even if everything in the world goes wrong in the next two days, it can be blocked off with rubble for the Level Up showcase without impeding gameplay any more than it had before.

Volumetric Portal

On a positive note, as I was placing down volume lights in the basement, I accidentally pointed one in the wrong direction which caused the player to become blinded for a second as they entered the Oracle room. I realized that using a volume box combined with draw distance could actually be created purposefully to make a really interesting effect. Who am I kidding? I love this. I love this so much...