The Rise of Dagon : Week of June 14 Update

This week was mostly about work on the level file format for the game.

I've had it in the back of my mind since starting the game how I might like to have the level format look like.

However once the actual form of the prefabs started taking place plans had to change just a bit ; I knew this would happen of course so its the reason I did a fair bit of exploratory work on the prefabs before attempting to begin work in earnest on the level format.

First thing was to sketch out in my handy (physical) notepad several ideas.

What was interesting is that putting it down on paper made it much more concrete about which items were going to be important for the level format.

This picture was the first sketch which looks a little interesting but wasn't what I went with:

In the end I was able to create a first pass level format and lay out some level details in much more particular than the larger prefabs I had been working with previously.  This is actually quite a good thing as it will permit the level format to have much more varied content.  

My previous efforts would have had all the corner pieces always exactly the same (just rotated).  Now I can have a corner that has a shelf on one wall or a  cracked wall on one side and a normal wall on the other side. The extra level of detail will help keep the levels from feeling too static!

Next up I did a fair bit of work throughout the week on the lighting and some shader work to go along with it.

I am very interested in having the physical based lighting model coming in Unity 5 but since I don't know how long that is going to take or even if I might be able to afford it or not I am trying to make things look as good as I can for now.

Firstly I used the torch that I made a couple of weeks ago and changed it from the old torch seen on the left with a standard diffuse + normal texture shader to a new emissive shader.  As you can see the area of the torch that would have the fire on appears to be red-hot as if its glowing!  

This effect of course makes the torch look much better (there are screenshots where it shows the pure black on the left and it looked bad).

Also I'll be using emissive shaders on other things (spells, glowing monster eyes etc) throughout the game so it was important to be able to get this working.

Finally I did some further tweaking to the lighting model I'm using which is to add HDR lighting to the camera.  What's interesting is then I added a tone mapping correction and played with all the options until I found that I was in fact able to get a much nicer tonal range if you compare the screenshot below you'll see that the new HDR lighting actually shows a better range of color in the near and far areas -- while still maintaining a rich dark (close to black) color where there is no lighting.

The image on the right however is much darker overall and the level just looks too darn dark even though you have a torch!

So these lighting changes really effect the atmosphere dramatically and I'm very happy with them!

Thanks for reading, see you next week!