What's New?

Today we share a quick update as to what we achieved this week.

We are hard at work spicing up our visuals! This means running multiple art passes, each dedicated to a certain aspect of the game's appearance. More specifically: we populated all areas with decorative objects, changed the architecture to improve lighting, and added small tweaks here and there. However, this does not suffice. Which is why we are currently taking care of fake lights, probes for reflections and light, as well as further tweaks to our lightmapping workflow.

New Architecture & Details

Even though our game takes place in the desert, you’ll find lush greenery every now and then. Obviously, these decorative assets increase the appeal of the scenery and to put some life into the dusty temple color palette. But, since distributing assets randomly always looks generic, we had to pay attention to image composition and what makes sense within the game world.

A simple example: On the surface the plants you encounter are mostly green and red, while in the shadowy rooms of the temple plants catch your attention with their luminescent blue. Of course, this isn't realistic in a botanical sense, but it establishes a consistent rule within the game's context. Besides plants, more environmental assets are used to decorate walls and other objects to bring more visual variety into the surrounding.

A Functional Interface 

We've created a first iteration of certain menu screens, particularly game settings. Each option had to be manually implemented, which amounted to quite a pile of work. Nonetheless, having configurable settings is a must-have in a PC game.

...and yes, the menu will receive a few layers of paint in the nearby future.

Next Hurdles

What we haven’t quite finished yet are the more technical aspects of the appearance. That means taking care of lighting out the scene with fake lights. For that, we need to solve some technical issues first. To not fry our computers we have to set up light baking sectors all across the level, as to break down the light baking workload into smaller chunks. In return, this enables us to up the quality a notch.

The effect of light and colors on moving objects, like enemies, represents another challenge.  For this, light probes are the way to go. The same goes for reflection probes with regards to shiny surfaces, such as razor-sharp cactus needles. Each probe shoots a 360° image to capture environmental light data, which it then transfers onto other objects. This trickery improves all sorts of visual aspects, ranging from reflective water puddles to a realistically lit lizard standing next to a torch.

Alright, that's it for today, just a short little interlude to keep you updated on our progress. Add our game to the your collection to get more such updates in the future and get informed about the big things happening, such as the release of the demo.

Have a great week and till next time!

Free Demo

We will release a free demo in Q1 2023, so stay tuned.

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