A breeze of fresh air

This week, as opposed to last week, I’ve been doing quite a lot of work.

I started the week with doing some small things to make the environment look less empty. An empty environment is something that really affects the feel of a game. Sometimes, if you do it on purpose, like in Mirrors edge for example it can work really well, making the game world feel like a fantasy, a dream, something perfect. But if your game world is empty just because you did not feel like making stuff, or didn’t have the time, it will most certainly show.

Most big production games have an awful lot of stuff going on everywhere, giving the scenery a history, a past. It feels more alive. Making little things to put on places where they don’t really belong, like trash on the floor beside a trash can, will give that tiny bit of history to your game.

As you can see we have made some major changes on the colour of our game. We did this to better convey our aesthetic goals. There is many ways to change the colour of things in Photoshop. You can either change all colours manually by picking a new colour and using the pen or paint bucket tool to put it where you want it. You can also change the hue or colour balance of every layer. Both these ways will take quite some time since the picture has many layers. But there is another way that is way faster and easier to do (and to change if you regret what you have done.

In Photoshop you have something called Adjustment layers. In an adjustment layer you can change things like the hue or colour balance of all layers underneath it. And it will do the same change to all colours, just like a for example coloured light would do. You can easily change how the adjustment layer will change the colour and you can turn it on and. You can also copy them to another photoshop document if you want to have the exact same “light” in that picture.

I have also made some “more important” things to our level this week. I have made doors (good to have in a modern building). The doors have only two states, closed and open. We did this because we did not want the player to have to wait for some multi-frame opening animation.

I made ventilation shafts that the player may use to sneak past certain areas. We decided to make the shafts big enough for the player to stand in since we have plenty of animations to do, without a crawling animation. But we wanted the shaft to somehow restrict the player; therefore we will code it so that the player will have to sneak in the shaft, consequently walking slower.