I moved my office into an incubator / art gallery this week.
The move is mostly for my own sanity. Turns out, working alone in your apartment for 9 months isn't the most fun in the world. It's a Herculean effort just to stay motivated. I also lost all semblance of a disciplined sleep schedule.
Productivity has been great since the move, and I'm back on a normal sleep schedule. Having people around is great, even if I mostly tune them out to focus on work (sorry guys).
In keeping with the production schedule, I finished the last frost level today. Unfortunately its massive size doesn't lend itself too well to screenshots. I tried my best:
I also completed the dialogue and cutscene for the first major player decision in the story. Sorry, no screenshots. It isn't much to brag about, but spoilers are spoilers.
Lastly, I updated the visuals for the movement prediction / block creation mechanic. Someone pointed out a while back that the old visuals made it difficult to distinguish overlapping shapes. Here's how it used to look (I always love sneering at old screenshots):
And here's the new effect with edge highlights:
I could have used a texture, but I ended up doing it in the shader based on UV coordinates:
const float radius = 0.15f;
float2 diff = float2(min(max(uv.x, radius), 1.0f - radius), min(max(uv.y, radius), 1.0f - radius)) - uv;
float highlight = 0.6f + (5.0f * (diff.x * diff.x + diff.y * diff.y) / radius);
I seem to recall reading a way to do it with only arithmetic primitives, but I couldn't remember it or figure it out.
A bunch of other stuff also happened that I won't bother listing. If you are for some reason interested in nitty gritty details, the Steam beta tester group has extensive changelogs.
That's it for this week! Thanks for reading.
You scared me for a moment, posting Screenshot Saturday on Friday
Art gallery? That's not a joke? Sounds like an awesome office.
Haha, I always post Friday night to make it into the /r/gamedev screenshot Saturday thread.
Yeah the front half is an art gallery, the back half is desks. The nice part is, every month there's a "gallery hop" and 2000 people will come through the doors and potentially try out the game! I'm really grateful to be there.