Week 7 Visuals!
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Only one more week until the conference! Things are getting close to being done, bug fixing, polishing, and fixing the last things with the UI and creating better readability for the game overall is what is on the table at the moment. We found numerous times that the game was quite difficult to grasp as items and objects the player could interact with blended in with the rest of the game world too much and thus became indistinguishable. What I and my team have been working on this past week have been to remedy that particular issue. First and foremost our objects the player directly interacts with in order to distract the guard have received a much more distinguishable shader along with a particle effect that attempts to mimic code, which seems fitting as the player is playing as an artificial intelligence residing within the computer mainframe of the facility.
The visuals of the game have changed quite drastically since the early tests. As this has been quite a risky take on visual style, where all of us are inexperienced with what it takes to make it look visually pleasing and still be informative to the player, I believe we are getting there.
Previously the interactive objects where using the shame shader as the larger tables but with a slight hint of green, this was far too subtle and now it also have a particle effect that emits random numbers and common code acronyms such as int, var, bool etc. The monitors are now monitors attached to the floor, at the moment they are still not easily readable that the player have to interact with them, but that is soon to be fixed. The visual style we have chosen is very minimalistic and simplistic, this is not by accident as we wanted the game to have a very clear and distinct style. Because of this, the artists in the group have been limited to experimenting with shaders and particle effects, whilst still attempting to keep it simple. Animations are now also properly added to the game and I am very pleased with how they look and convey various actions of the characters. What can also be seen in the latest image is the addition to two new features, toggle guard sight and toggle guard sight, at first I wanted to have the pathing of the guard be displayed with a fancy particle effect however that did not work as intended and was unnecessarily heavy and perhaps did not deliver the most clarity to the player. What we will be continuing to do in the last week is to keep clarifying things and add visuals where needed as all the essentials are in place, we also will be adding some sound effects to help with this. What we need to do first and foremost is have a localized play test session where we can gather data on what we need to clarify the most.
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Note: placements on the interactive objects (green tables) are temporary and are subject to change.