Firstly I have been integrating a new dungeon set into the game! I purchased this level set and I was very surprised to find something of this quality level that suited my game so well!
Here we have an example of the new level set with the Servant of Dagon meeting his end by the Cemetery Gates spell:
As you see it looks just brilliant! The materials are well done and high resolution and as you see the lighting and shadows from the spell really show off nicely against the rich texture set.
Furthermore I've been spending quite a bit of time polishing the lighting in many different respects.
One thing I've been working on is getting the right mix of dark and light in the dungeon. This shot shows off something close to what I want when the player has no light :
As you see the dark is truly rich and foreboding ; the player has very little ability to see outside of the given light sources and would create a good level of suspense forcing the player to stick to the lit areas in fear of what lies in the dark!
What you can't see in these stills is the work I've been doing on the lights to make them softly glow and pulse to simulate an actual fire. Each light source has 2-3 point lights that are colored and animated different giving different yellow/orange highlights and pulse/flicker at different rates as well as cast shadows that move.
All together its looking really good ! There is some difficulty of maintaining perfect lighting when swapping level sets though ; supposedly PBR materials are supposed to help solve this problem but at this time I still find it tough with my 2 level sets to get a lighting level that makes them both look absolutely perfect..Its a tough decision that I'm putting off right now but I could hypothetically create some "per level" kind of lighting variables that get updated when you load between level sets. This would allow me to really nail the lighting levels of course but I'm being stubborn and working with the materials and the light settings themselves right now to try and achieve that rather than resorting to this shortcut.
While there are still many other items to show off I'm going to swap gears and discuss what's really been keeping my head down for the last month or so and that is I've been working very hard on composing my Kickstarter.
I've run into enough surprises and challenges while working on it I'm considering writing a few blog entries on those challenges.
Some areas of interest that I think might be interesting is Taxes (yeah ugly topic but very important!), Rewards & Fulfillment (slightly more exciting but risky and complex), and the Fine Art of Estimating Your Project Goal.
The actual project goal has been incredibly enlightening to me - I really always thought it was just a matter of filling in blanks on a spreadsheet but I've now done 5 different sets of spreadsheet calculations based off of different assumptions and come up with different numbers. Each set of assumptions could be totally legitimate or completely wrong!
Anyways.. I'm unclear on who reads the posts or what interest level there would be on these kickstarter articles ; I know a lot of people see the word Kickstarter and close the page right away so please leave a note or drop me a line if your interested in such material!
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