DAY 22
So after a few days away to recharge my batteries, I'm coming back to the project in full force. So much force that I forgot to give an update on what I was working yesterday.
SO...one of the things I've worked on yesterday and today expanding the first level with zones that are solely created for exploration purposes.
"But Baftis", I hear you say, "isn't your entire game based on exploration and walking?" Yes, it is, BUT.... the Golden Path (a.k.a. the path that the designer intends for the player to play in) also has some puzzle elements, some platforming elements, some hazards and so on. These exploration areas do not and will not have such things. Sure, they'll have the occasional fail states (dying by fall damage and/or drowning), but that's about it. Allow me to exemplify, fellow indie game dev.
This is the second iteration of the exploration area I've shown you (Day 21 post). This second iteration consists of an enlarged lake with a church partially submerged in the lake.
I am painfully aware that the underwater post-process is non-existent but it is on the way. What I am also painfully aware is of a post process bug in which meshes that are under water show their outline, but shouldn't. Luckily enough, I have a solution for this.
Strap your seat belts, technical-reading inclined devs, you are about to enter the domain of "if it works it ain't stupid" hacks.
So, as you can see in this picture...
The church is partially submerged underwater, but the outlines underneath the water are still showing. At first I thought "It's the Toon Shader who is causing the problem". That would be a big nope, because the entirety of the blueprint is plugged into the emissive component of the master node.
Then I thought "surely, it's a water material issue". And after closer inspection, I've discovered that it... isn't a water material issue. The material is refractive and 100% opaque. So the only conclusion I came to is that, separately, the Toon Shader (applied as a post process effect) works properly and the water material (applied on the mesh) works as it should. But together do no work properly. OK, at this point I was stumped and had no idea how to fix any of the blueprints.
BUT...a solution presented itself out of nowhere.
We know this: the Toon Shader draws the object outline underwater but the water is completely opaque. That obviously means that any object placed under water would have it's outline drawn, or at least part of it. But I also noticed that some overlapped meshes do not have their entire outline drawn. And then this idea struck: I would figure that if I'd put a horizontal plane mesh as big as the body of water just a tiny bit under the water mesh, it would obstruct other meshes and force the toon shader to stop drawing outlines. And oddly enough, it worked. And here are the before and after screenshots:
(I would've made a GIF that showed how it worked, but I have no idea how to make one and at this point in the night I'm honestly too lazy to learn how to do it)
Well, that about does it for the exploration areas in Level 1, time to move on to what I've worked on for Level 2.
This is the very start of level 2. After you would have solved the puzzle with the big door, you would eventually have reached this area, which is traditionally called "the transitional area", but I like to call this "the breather area", because it is the least intense part of the level. These walkways would be made out of wood and are (or will be) be suspended from above by wires.
This is the same area, from another angle.
This would be a tiny canyon that the player can traverse on foot. It's around this area that I'd like to implement the first use of rope swinging (if I can get it to work).
This would be the end of the breather area, slowly revealing the meat-y section of this level as the player moves up towards the edge.
For the section that follows, I have in mind something akin to the rock pillars from the movie Avatar. Because of the nature of those rock pillars, I also plan to implement these mechanics: rope swinging, ziplining and grapple hook. Of these three, as I've mentioned before, I only have rope swinging (which doesn't work) and ziplines (which do work). I do not have the grappling hook mechanic made at all. One other idea would be to also implement wall running, but I'm not entirely sure about that.
And that would be about it for this post. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.