This is a short update for a short week, which had just two days of work before leading into Thanksgiving Break. We started the week by doing a full playthrough of our experience with Ricardo, and using this test to identify any fixes and last changes we needed to make. We compiled a list of several small tasks to work on, but we also walked away with one more consequential change: we decided to cut our screen-wide oil painting shader.
There were two main reasons for this decision. First, even after restoring the 3D effect to the shader, we had never managed to completely remove the other visual glitches and jittery movement it introduced. This made parts of our game that had previously felt good, such as the movement, become very frustrating and unreliable. In addition, when compared side-by-side to a version of our game without the effect, it was clear that the natural 3D of the VR headset without was still far superior and more convincing than the version we had created manually. Beyond the technical limitations though, the other reason for cutting the effect was actually much more positive: our new “painting in stop motion” effect that we had used to texture our world’s objects was good enough on its own to convey our intended art style, without the need for our older shader. Cutting it made our experience better both technically and artistically.
Moving into Thanksgiving break, we plan to finish our last fixes to the scene, and then polish up our onboarding and offboarding experiences. This includes a plan to record voiced dialogue for the fictional sleep study before and after the main dream section, which we hope will both make the instructions clearer and provide a bigger contrast between the dream and the “real world.” Overall, we are happy with our progress, and look forward to showing our experience at Soft Opening and beyond.