Welcome back! Last week I promised I’ll show some major visual changes in the game. Let’s see what we have here!
Finally Sneaky! Moonlight environment
One of our dear playtesters during the course pointed out that the overall style is cheery and bright. Too bright for a stealth game, actually. I glanced at our favorite stealth games and immediately noticed that this has to change before the first playable release.
Originally we planned that Shadowdancer will travel through various locations, including forest outskirts, natural caves, ruins, and underground. With the limitations I mentioned earlier, we made this demo in a forest/mountainside environment. We both loved the real-time lighting, post effects, and soft colors, and it stayed that way for the whole 8 weeks, as we were focusing on refining the gameplay and the interactions.
During the next few days, I copied the original level and rebuilt the lighting for a night environment. The procedural Sky and the toned down global illumination did the trick! But now the scene was overly dark, with only Shadowdancer’s tattoos and runes glowing. To resolve this, I added torches to the scene to highlight important areas and create counterpoints for the dark evening sky.
In this short video you can see how darkness changed the whole mood of the game.
Main Menu and Title Screen
I finally took time and started learning how to use Cinemachine and Timeline. I aimed to create an animated title screen. For this, I choose the windy cliff near the temple.
I put a few additional rocks, ruins, and a campfire into the scene. Then I set up animation, just an “idle” loop, for now. Finally, I created a Cinemachine dolly track and set the camera to look at the character. The camera will slowly rotate around, while the menu elements stay on the left.
What comes next?
We upload the current version, and you can try it out! Any kind of constructive feedback is welcome. Please keep in mind that this is a learning project, and it is at a very early stage. In the following weeks, we are planning to do some minor fixes, and a bit of further project management to see how we can expand the game with more levels.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed this post.
See you soon!
