Something over the horizon

Why, hi there!

Gotland Game Conference 2017 is just around the corner and you can feel it; almost taste it. This week, overall polish has been on the menu. One larger change in the level is the outlook of the second half of one of the areas. All areas in the game have different looks and this specific area is school-themed. Like the other parts of the game, it has been modeled and remodeled again and again. To be frank, I thought it looked boring. It had no interesting silhouette; no proper focal point. It had to change. It was late in production, so I felt a bit pressure. At the same time, I had to take responsibility for the task as well, since I was the one who brought up the issue in the first place.

I made a model that kind of looked like a golfball (I was going for a crow’s nest…) with books stacked tightly together. It had a staircase of books leading up to a hole in it, where the player could enter. Inside you, could either take more steps upwards or downstairs. The inside had school benches, enormous pencils and chairs to resemble an absurd take on a classroom. However, the design was a bit complex and consider the few days we had left, we as a group decided to scrap the model since it would require more time than available to make it work fluidly. Something easier had to replace it.

What I did was to go back to an earlier design I made; one that was inspired by Journey and Rime. You present a large and tall tower/mountain in front of the player and several routes around it at the same time. That way you invite the player to explore as well as reminding them that one route will surely lead up to the top of the mountain/tower. All in all, having a focal point is never bad. It works wonder in guiding the player to where to go next. Navigation by using soley environment has been difficult, but Somnium is getting there; slowly, but surely.

There are two days left until the conference and it’s going to be so much fun! One more work day and then the game is gold! I can’t wait to let people test our game!

Have a great weekend, dear reader!

”Field study”

Hello again!

Last time I spoke about the pulsating sludge that is covering a field in the nightmare. When Olivia transforms the nightmare to a pleasant dream, the surroundings change and I wish to share what the field looks like then.

To start with, the field comes right after the player leaves the representation of Olivias old home. The setting is that she used to live on the countryside, hence the setting. However, the field is ruined in the nightmare. On the other hand, in the pleasant dream, I took models of tall grass and covered it underneath. I chose tall grass to make it represent that it grows freely and in a wild, unkept fashion. If the grass had been short, it would rather represent cut grass; order and neatness. Olivia is a child and therefore such verbs shouldn’t be associated with her. Freedom and playful chaos is better suited for a happy child.

To make sure the tall grass didn’t clip through the sludge in the nightmare, I sank the terrain in order to hid it. When you waddle through the sludge (with the right equipment), it dissolves and reveals the grass underneath. In theory, and to some extent this was not a difficult task at all. What it was, was tedious. Making sure that the ground that was tilting down felt smooth instead of a sharp drop took some time. Also, the grass models clipped through each other and I had to hide this well. Since the ground has small hills in certain locations, this was a bit finicky to get right. It looks good now, but there are so many grass models that I will probably have to give it another look from time to time just to make sure.

How to animate the inanimated

Hi there!

This time I would like to share some sludge with you, dear reader. More specifically, how to make it come alive. No black magic needed though, only a shader.

To start from the beginning; the idea was that Olivia, the protagonist, was to wade across a dead field that was overflooded with a thick sludge. However, since the setting was a nightmare, the sludge needed some more umph. So I wanted it to move, like it was alive and wanting to clutch tentrils around Olivia and pull her down (not unlike the slimy symbiote in Spiderman 3). So I needed the field to pulsate and in general move irregularly. I got the inspiration from a documentary about Hitchcock’s classic movie ”Psycho” that when something moves without a pattern, or at least a pattern that is hard to follow, it makes the audience uncomfortable. That’s exactly what I wanted to achieve when the player walks across this field of sludge, as if every step forward is a struggle.

Visually, I was very inspired by the enemy in Dark Souls 3 called Pus of Man. 

However, our game has handpainted textures and we don’t use normal maps, so creating a similar look was difficult. I could make it pulsate in a irregular fashion sideways, but it looked strange on the vertical axis. It moved around in a different way than wanted, so I had to make some changes. The end result was that it still moved on the surface as well, but not to the same extent as originally intended. In other words, I had to give up a part of the primary idea in order for the overall look to work!

Here is the shader I made for the sludge!

Cave Craving

Hello again!

Somnium is in a way a linear game, but at the same time, we want the player to explore as well. So in other words, you can go straight to solving the puzzles to complete the game, but there is a world to explore as well if you want.

Creating different routes to take from point A to point B is what I have been working on today. For instance, you can cross a river and walk past an opening to a cave. The end of the cave leads you somewhere, but you can just as well venture onwards through other means as well.

So with that said, the end is the same for every player. However, how you get there is up to you!

Me vs the World

So week 6 of Big Game Project has begun.

The structure of the game world has been victim to change after change. I was never fully happy with the layout until just now.

It began as a huge world with a linear layout; then it became more expanded, but overall shorter. It’s been going from point A to B, A to C and THEN to B.

It was important to me that the world the player explores works well with the puzzles that are presented on the path to the finish line. I wanted that to be crystal clear, but saying and doing are two different things.

In other words, the world that the player moves in wasn’t clear to me nor the rest of the team. I was walking around in circles trying to design something that just clicked. And finally something did click!

I more or less went back to the original idea of a linear route, however what is different now is that the world has clearer areas that differ from one another. The terrain now also varies in height, so you travel down slopes and up hills. I am sure to be biased, but all in all the world feels more alive. In the following week, I intend to take this even further to create, together with my dear crew, a game both nightmarish and wonderful!