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[Red Spark]

Hello, my name is Anton, and I'm opening this DevLog for my hobby project called DarkWave (temporary title).

••• ABOUT
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DarkWave is an episodic survival horror game featuring zombies (sort of), items, puzzles and inventory management. It goes back to the roots of the genre, which was popularized back in 1996-2000 during the golden age of PlayStation by prominent classics like Resident Evil 1-2-3, Alone in the Dark 4, Silent Hill and a few others. The core gameplay revolves around navigating maze-like environments, solving puzzles and searching for items, which in turn can unlock further locations with more items and puzzles in them. All that is typically accompanied with dark gritty atmosphere, strong narrative, underpowered protagonist and monster-like enemies.

••• TECHNOLOGY
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As of now, DarkWave is envisioned as a web 3d game, with 45 degrees top down view. I'm currently prototyping it with PlayCanvas WebGL framework, which gives me nostalgic reminiscences of my early days in Flash MX, when technology was still young, quirky and required a great deal of know-how to achieve anything spectacular. I'm digging into custom GLSL shaders, exotic lighting models, post-processing effects and other tricks to make it look unique and interesting and also to hide the fact that I have no time budget to go for highly detailed geometry and textures.

••• EPISODIC?
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I really liked the way how Alan Wake story was structured, so I wanted to borrow that model and adapt it for my game. Breaking the game into small standalone episodes (~1 hour of gameplay each) would greatly reduce risks and stresses typically associated with long-term indie projects. I'll elaborate on that further in my future updates.

••• BUILDS
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Prototype 01: coming soon

I'm planning to update this thread 1-2 times per month with new stuff like screenshots, design choices, sneak peeks and playable prototypes. The first environment prototype is already underway, so stay tuned for more exciting stuff in upcoming month or two.

Cheers!

[Red Spark]

Halfway through the lighting shader:



••• SOFT LIGHTING
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The standard PlayCanvas lighting is pretty simplistic, so I wanted to create a custom shader to achieve semi-realistic area lights to accomplish soft low-key moody lighting. The rendering is linear and tonemapped with default filmic equation (used in Uncharted 2).

••• SHADOWING AND AO
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I'm also looking for an interesting way to achieve soft shadowing and AO. A traditional approach doesn't click it for me, so I'm looking forward to implementing something from the realm of distance fields, described in this pdf. Since game locations are intended to be relatively small, distance fields data is expected to be in the range of 100-200 KB for majority of locations.

••• FROM 2D to 3D
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Before I decided to make this project in 3D, I was prototyping it in top down 2D:



This scene was modeled in 3D app first and then overpainted in Photoshop. The process proved to be rather time consuming and not iteration-friendly, that's why I restarted the game as a low-poly 3D.

Cheers and take care!