Shavra - Small Update news

Hello again!

I've been working on improving the existing maps a bit and also added a new one. Dungeons, crypts and mines are of course an integral part of the fantasy adventure genre and I do intend to both make them interesting and engaging. For that I have specific ideas to stretch the gameplay to last at least 15 minutes per level. The "indoorsy" nature of these areas allows me to optimize them to both be quite large and labyrinthian while maintaining a flawless frame rate (See my old optimization tutorial in the tuts section if you too would like to know how to do this. Specifically, turn off the terrain and water whenever the player can not see it.)

Shavra takes a lot of inspiration from older fantasy games, stuff that came out in the late 90s and early 2000s simply because those games had very isolated gameplay beats. You reach a puzzle, you solve it, you move on, you encounter an enemy, you deal with it, you move on... this is in contrast to newer games like "The Witcher" or "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" where there are constant interconnecting systems engaging each other and plenty of stats being updated, changed...so forth. I don't intend to make the game feel simple by any means, there is just less number crunching under the hood because I know well enough that I couldn't code that in LUA. So if you encounter a trap in Shavra, you will have to deal with it independent of your current relationship to the kings wife or what potion you drank 2 levels prior.
I ..err... hope this makes sense

So this level is far from done of course but I decided to lightmap an early version of it and the results can be seen below.

I am also still in the process of converting media. Currently on the chopping block are unfamillias cartoon assets, which will be remolded to go with my art style but are otherwise quite useful and the stock medieval buildings by arteria 3d. Not only do these get a fresh coat of paint and shader maps but I also managed to reduce their polycount by several hundred polygons. File and texture size are also far more lightweight

You see that the dungeon is a bit too colorful for my taste and not everything is 100% polished, at this stage nothing is, but I will not tweak it too much as this will eventually get ported to GGX. So there is little point in fine tuning a lighting system that will be replaced anyway.

As always, thanks for reading and please let me know your thoughts

Just improved maps.



-Wolf