This week we finished implementing (almost) all of the features of our experience!
A big part of reaching this stage was how we managed to finish up work on the lake and cave very early in the week. This let us spend a day or two fully incorporating them into our game’s main scene and linking them together with the existing scenes, while being careful not to break anything in the process. We also took steps to unify all four scenes, making sure our original two had as many dynamic visual changes as our newer scenes. Our artists and programmers also worked hard on implementing new animations for our shadow figures, as well as for other objects in the scene. We also added animation to other objects in the scene, such as clock hands and the lighthouse light spinning, and dark shapes swimming underwater in the lake. Our shadow figures could now also “infect” other game objects they touch, covering them with the same kind of wobbly shadow material that composed their bodies. This greatly added to the sense of danger and foreboding conveyed by the shadows.
On a larger scale, we made two important breakthroughs with our art style this week that make our whole experience feel more finished and cohesive. First, we tried numerous techniques to reintroduce stereoscopic 3D to our oil paint screen effect, which had previously flattened the appearance of our experience last week. We discovered that by putting the same effect on two render textures and then positioning them carefully in front of each of the player’s virtual eyes, we could reproduce the 3D effect that we had previously lost. There are still some glitches to this approach, including a fair amount of visual jitter and screen tearing, but overall we are much closer to where we need to be.
Second, after conversations with Ricardo about how to make our environments more dynamic, we made a final overhaul to our art style to create the appearance of a painting in motion. By creating multiple paint-like textures for every object, as well as a shader that could distort the edges of any mesh, we created a low framerate “stop motion” effect that suggested that the environment was being “repainted” multiple times per second. It took some tweaking to make sure this effect was not too jarring, but once we found a good rate, we finally had an environment that was shifting as constantly as we had always envisioned. For now this effect is only fully implemented in the cemetery, but we plan to incorporate it into the three other scenes early next week.
While there are still a few placeholder or rough draft assets in our experience, and there are definitely still some bugs to fix, as of the end of this week our experience is now fully playable. This sets us up really well as we move into Soft Opening the week after Thanksgiving break. Those final changes next week should allow us to move into this final phase of our project focusing mostly on documenting our work and developing our final presentation.