Week 3 – Shaders and lookdev
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This week have been spent mostly with attempting to identify what the game will look after some concerns were raised with the previous visions we had. In order to sell the idea that you are in fact playing as an AI we need to first figure out an impossible to answer question. “What would the world look like to an seemingly omniscient AI?” There is no right answer to this impossible to answer question obviously, thus we needed to experiment to find something that we believe would be pleasant to the eyes. First of all, we attempted to gather references to something we thought could sell the idea that you are in fact an AI:
We quickly found the example on the very bottom to be quite appealing to look at, thus we decided to attempt to first reach something akin to that. And whilst doing that we figured it mostly could be solved in a smart way with shaders, thus it had the possibility to save us tons of time by skipping the need to manually UV and texture the assets and bypass the need to light the scenes by hand. With the deadline in mind, if we see something that have the potential to save us time, it is indeed worth pursuing, in this particular case due to the matter of shaders being an untouched area by the team it is quite a big risk to take. As I have the role as lead art I decided to pursue it, but if we could not achieve something close to what we wanted in a weeks time it was determined that the risky art style should be reconsidered. After the first day we had something looking something like this:
It most certainly had the potential to turn out to something to what we had in mind, though something was lacking, ignoring the incredibly overuse of image effects. The above was achieved by applying a shader that is driven by a cubemap to all objects, what this meant whilst actually playing the game however is that all the walls and such is treated as a single entity and the texture is scrolling all over it. The bad thing with this in our case is that it quickly becomes a headache whilst playing the game. After a couple of more days of experimenting we had this: The introduction of everything seemingly built out of incoherent code(to us) it most certainly is getting closer to the feel we want to achieve. What remains however is figuring out how to make the camera ignore some objects particularly the fields where the characters are walking about, at the moment everything is sort of blending together in a messy way which desperately needs to be addressed. Right now we have a wireframe shader and a fresnel shader with a rim effect for the characters. The same fresnel shader is applied to the objects itself. The floor is 2×2 planes with a translucent shader and a simple texture:
And oh, I just could not resist to play with some classic JJ Abrams effects:
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Sadly this is borderline unplayable, but oh my, it sure does look pretty!