So if you've been keeping up with things, you'll have heard me ranting on about the need to upgrade our rendering engine sooner than we had planned. The ensuing results are now available for people to look at!
Basically, the long and short of it is that people were starting to write off our game a bit since we hadn't yet taken the time to make it look as visually appealing as other titles out there. We had been saving that for the end, once all of the functionality was done, but people wanted it faster, and who are we to deny them?
So after working on it all for a couple of weeks, we've finally got the new lighting system incorporated into the game proper, with some pretty stunning results. It's still very early days at the moment, and there is still a lot of work to go (which I can't stress enough) but some of the new effects such as the parallax mapping and cubic stencil shadows are really giving the game's visuals an edge that it didn't have before.
There was some CrAzY math involved in getting all of this to work, so feel at least a little bit of pity for us poor developers! However, the end justified the means. Take a look at some of these beautiful screens!
So yeah, pretty cool, huh? As we progress it'll look even better with things such as reflections on the weapons, projection mapping, specular bloom, etc, so keep an eye out (I REPEAT! WORK IN PROGRESS! lol people never seem to read these things thoroughly)
Anyway, in other news, our art team are pumping out some truly remarkable stuff, which I'll be showing off as soon as it's ready to be shown off! And once the game is a little more bug-free with the new lighting engine, I'll be sure to whip up a new gameplay video showing it all off!
Bye for now!
Very nice lighting system! Perhaps you can extend it to the player's weapon(s) (assuming they're going to remain 2D?
Oh, and in regards to the whole "people don't seem to read our WIP warnings", I'd imagine it's because your game looks like a AAA game, so people expect the whole dang thing to look and play like one, too! (Don't you just hate it when that happens?)
Hahaha thank you for the compliment! To hear that people see it as a AAA title is about as good a compliment as we could get!
However, we did actually mention in the news post that the weapons will be having the lighting applied, including reflections on the blades. They're 3D in-game models, so they animate and whatnot for a bit more of an immersive experience :)
I love the Diablo-esque interface, and the atmosphere you are creating in this game is exceptional. To me, atmosphere is the second most important element in a game, after gameplay. Keep up the good work and I'll be keeping an eye on your progress.
Thank you! We totally agree with you on that! If the game doesn't immerse you, then it's not worth playing!
The lighting is looking great. In my opinion, the game still looked really good before all of the cool lighting effects. It's a shame that so many gamers can't look past the rough to see the diamond.
You're awesome :D
This looks like it could be an amzingly addictive game like those of old. I miss the simplicity of the old TB RPGs. If you ever need any help with voice acting let me know.
That's great to know! We have several voice actors for the demo, but once the full version is in full swing we'll need as many as we can get. Send us some links to folios, examples, etc, to visual_outbreak@yahoo.com.au and we'll take a look!