New this week

This week I completed the first draft for TS1_2x2_1. I also added the pre-existing models to the treasure room. Alongside this I updated some of the lighting settings I was using because they seemed a bit off.

Tile Art

I’m fairly happy with how the TS1_2x2_1 turned out. The corners have a rather high poly count, but I did decimate it down. I actually like how sharp and almost buggy the bone side looks. Interestingly I’m not sure the point filter setting is working correctly as some of the pixels are pretty blurry.

Anyway, below is a slideshow of the TS1_2x2_1 and the WIP and most importantly, unlit treasure room.

With respects to the treasure room, I will probably need to rework the central raised area to accommodate an item container of rectangular size. I intend on surrounding it with candles to use light to draw the player and raise its importance.

Lighting changes

I did a little bit of testing with height maps to see if baked lighting would be affected by it but still no cigar. The biggest problem is I don’t know the term for when a rough surface casts shadows onto itself so I can’t properly research it. It must be possible with baked lighting and I know it’ll make a big difference, especially around the light sources.

I’ve made some changes to the lighting settings I’m using, before all my baked lights had hard shadows. Hard shadows look bad unless you sit there and analyse why the shadow is where it is, this is frankly not very good. I’ll still need to tinker around with what soft lighting value to use but it has made immediate improvements.

Quick Proc Gen Addendum

I tested quickly with a build of the game and the level generation is almost as fast as it was before the async changes. This tells me a majority of the performance problems is due to the editor.

What’s next?

Next is to finish the treasure room. Afterwards is to work on the boss room. After that I’ll get to work on more entertaining stuff again like enemy variety or weapon animations.