I love the dark mood and ambience the graphics show so far! The orthographic camera gives it a unique look
keep the good work dude!
Cheers fella!
________________________________________________
So I've been busy working on EMPORIUM. Thought it friendly to poke my head out and show a little of that.
Here I am sat on my desk, hard at work
The most complete scene I have to show is "
Scene III - Body of Water"
It's a smush of a childhood memory of mine, as well as some hefty visual metaphor and actual EMPORIUM lore/themes. Although at this stage I'm sure all three are incarnations of one-another.
Wire frame to texture-less render in blender
In-game shot of "Scene III - Body of Water"
In-game shot of "Scene III - Body of Water"
I had a rough old time getting the water looking how I wanted. With my drastic inability to write shaders and it being a prominent element of the scene it was a bit of an up hill struggle that I probably spent too much time on!
I eventually settled on unity's default water shader for the main body of water. But I was super keen to have the waves foam at the edges of the objects it hit. After wasting real life money on some unity store water assets to try and achieve this I soon realised that since my hansom orthographic camera doesn't have a depth pass, the desired effect wasn't gunna happen for me.
Defeated, I ate dinner.
During my most welcome food break I came up with a hack-y botch to get what I wanted.
Final water foam effect.
Basically, I started laying out flat meshes where things met the water and cut holes where objects intersected. They're positioned about 0.01 above the actual water mesh to avoid clipping artefacts.
I then set about making textures for each of those meshes to illustrate foam. A standard unity cut-out shader was then added to each mesh. All I did after that was animate the alpha cut-off slider in and out to simulate the water movement.
Foam texture from the two errant barrels.
You'll see there's a slight gradient going towards the barrels as well a bit of texture. As the alpha cut-off is tweaked you get a feel of movement. Animating the barrels up and down was of course more straight forward.
It's not 100% what I had in mind, nor is it 100% natural. But it functions well and over all gives the scene it's desired movement at least!
________________________________________________
I've also got a large chunk of the writing done. I started doing proper final writing in the very beginning of January and soon realised composing dialogue is a deeply skilled trade and that I was in no way equipped to handle the task!
So to combat this my approach to the storytelling completely changed and shifted perspective dramatically. Everything fell into place after that. In the fallout of this the narrative content of EMPORIUM took on a much more introspective tone. If you may permit me to be a little open here. Aspects of my person sensibility and my own therapy sessions were bleeding into the writing, through the lens of EMPORIUM's narrative, albeit poetically mirrored and hidden in thickly layered metaphor! I was slightly taken aback by how well things lined up. So despite initially feeling a little intimidated I embraced it!
The functional fallout of this is the dialogue trees don't run quite as deep as I initially intended, however fewer choices have allowed me have those choices actually impact the game world to a certain extent as well as generate the possibility of two subtly different endings
________________________________________________
So you've read this far, why not have a treat? Work on the music for EMPORIUM has begun!
Plans were put in place to work with a composer buddy of mine and record with a cellist. Time, budget and scheduled constraints have rendered that pipe dream impossible. So I am taking on the music myself. Given the newly acquired personal nature of EMPORIUM it seems more fitting for it to be a solo endeavour.
I've been making some early explorations into the sonic landscape of EMPORIUM and here are my results. This doesn't feel final yet, but I think I'm at least facing the right direction.
Here's a screen grab of me laying out the composition for those that want to sing along at home
Community
