New this week

This week I completed the draft for the treasure room and started greyboxing the interior of the boss room. However, I think I’ll abandon these efforts because it will be easier to create a boss attack pattern and base the room around those.

Tile Art

Overall, I am very happy with how the treasure room turned out. I few less important things could be added to further spruce it up further, but they seem unnecessary for a first draft. However, looking back on it, it might need a little extra lighting. Below is a slideshow of the tile.

One thing I’ll need to look into is seeing if prefab reflection probes are a thing. Normal maps require some form of real time lighting in order to do their thing. Currently that’s being controlled by the skybox which is just using the Hub scene’s skybox. This is fine but gives everything a blue sheen which looks off. This can be solved by either reflection probes or just making a second skybox that’s more orange. I’ll see which is easier or looks better and make a decision there eventually.

Lighting Strangeness

Using the prefab lightbaker is like plugging holes in a sinking boat. Occasionally, and for seemingly random reasons, the lighting breaks and needs to be rebaked and reassigned. Usually these make themselves obvious (i.e. completely botched lighting) but occasionally it will be harder to immediately detect. When no baked lighting data is present baked lights will default to acting like real time light. This manifests in stranger shadows and unfathomable performance drops. However, due to the already mysterious nature of unity inspector performance these issues aren’t always immediately obvious.

What’s next?

I completely forgot the starting room exists. I’ll work on that and that’ll wrap up tile art for a while.

After the starting room is complete, I will be moving onto creating the boss and its animations. This will be a multi-week endeavour. I’ll leave the boss room simple for the time being as the nature of the fight will inform the design of the boss room.

The creation of a boss will also require an overhaul in the enemy health system. When the boss is large just having a single capsule encompass the entire model won’t work. So somewhere along this line I’ll have to create a proper hitbox system.

I keep forgetting about the combat zone doors and doorways so I’ll need to find somewhere in the timeline to create those.