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Flying Tugboat Studios3 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I wrote the majority of the call but left spots for my friend (comedian/voice actor) to improvise and  make it feel natural, and oh boy did he. 

Interesting feeling you got about that last map- trust your feelings. I wanted to make sure this was a super short "game" and not just a single level experience and was using the third map as  a sort of physics test to see how many simultaneous objects my computer could handle and decided: for a game made in a week I'll just throw it in. I think if we update the game sticking to  office interiors that are architecturally accurate would be an emphasis. Like, where is the elevator in this world? Bathrooms? Storage closets? The true mystery of Squirrel Slayer3D.

I'm curious about your thoughts on lighting. I was thinking about adding a 'lamp' fixture to make more diegetic light, and some of the lights themselves should be placed more accurately, but did you feel the game was too dark? Too inconsistent? Lighting wasn't realistic enough? I did a lot of experimenting in this regards and would want to get my formula down pat. 

For the revolver: I felt uneasy about putting guns in the game, or even just making a game that had the player shoot a gun, so while adding a nice PBR texture to the revolver was on the wishlist (as well as other weapons of course) I left it sort of stupid and comic looking for my own insecurities about publishing things with firearms. Shininess would help it play much better though.

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acgaudette3 years ago

great job (both of you), in that case!

just cleared the game again. still fun! I appear to have improved in my sleep, as well.

it depends on the tone you are trying to set [with lighting]. on the one hand, it feels dark in an unintentional way. on the other hand, I now associate the feel of the game with how dark it is (and I like it). there are some parts of the map where this leads to readability issues that are probably too egregious to ignore (stuff you just can't see) but all in all it's a personal design choice. there are no wrong decisions.

realism, physically-based rendering, etc. would seem to clash somewhat with the 'shareware' direction you have cooking. baking vertex lighting into your meshes and leaning into photogrammetry seems like the natural next step--this is why I brought up the revolver: it's one of the few untextured and unprocessed assets in the game (or it at least appears to be), which makes it stand out.

I understand wanting to avoid guns in general--it's something that many of us are feeling these days. at some level it is difficult to overcome the fact that your game somewhat centrally features a firearm in the workplace (i.e. this might be one of those 'lean all the way in' or 'run away screaming' thematic/tone decisions). however, one of the things you can do--if 'comic looking' is indeed your goal--is mess with proportions. the current asset is essentially a scale revolver.

probably the most significant observation I have re: the lighting is that it appears largely to be direct (and quite harsh). you have many light sources, but not much indirect lighting (i.e. not much bouncing, and therefore not much diffuse light). this leads to patches of absolute dark surrounded by patches of brightness. you can resolve this with some kind of GI solution, baking/lightmapping, or just by adjusting your ambient. the latter is the fastest trick in the west and will probably get you more bang for your buck, but given your visual style, baking would seem to vibe more. all this stuff is up to you--how do you feel about the lighting? given that this looks like something from the early 2000s, you might want to go see what you can steal from the era.

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Flying Tugboat Studios3 years ago(+1)

This was our first time developing with Godot, and using a GI probe on the map has three different lighting settings to juggle: dynamic range, spread (or something like that), and energy. There was always a 'notch' in the settings that would separate the lighting from being bright and ambient to dark and shadowy. For this game I picked dark and shadowy, however I think bringing the energy way down and the spread up might bring out some of the finer details and split the difference a bit. Also Giant Killer Squirrels coming out of the shadows was sort of freaky to us and we liked the darker vibe. 

On a tangent, I think Godot 3.4 is mainly focused on 2D applications and the support has been focused on that aspect of the engine. We encountered some strange hiccups in the 3D world, mainly around lighting and physics, but overall liked the quirks or at least found ways to make them fun. 

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