Update and a Trailer!
It's been quite a while!
The planets have aligned once again, which means one thing: it’s time for a new blog post!
It's been quite a while, and in the meantime, I've made significant progress on the game. I've worked on improving the graphics quite a bit. Although the game still features developer textures, the new rendering features make the game look and feel much better. The developer textures have a certain charm to them. It Reminds me quite a lot of using the Hammer and the Thief 2 editor.
Since it's been such a long hiatus, I'm also releasing a video alongside this update! This is a gameplay trailer/teaser, all rendered in-engine. Obviously, it's still all programmer art with temporary visuals, which will improve substantially throughout the course of the development.
I've made a lot of improvements to the underlying game engine, especially improving the rendering capabilities. There are now shadows, volumetric fog, and clouds, along with better lighting, new shaders, and cool skies!
The design of the game has moved forward as well! It mostly involved removing levels, and getting rid of gameplay elements that were not very interesting.
In the trailer you’ll see the ball going through some portals which changes the world around the ball. This is a new addition and is the means by which the ball travels throughout the worlds.
Previously there were those green buttons that would teleport you to other worlds, and they were there since the very initial versions of the game. But I didn’t like how it worked gameplay wise.
This effect is super cool, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to show it before the game was released. But at the same time, it's such a cool effect, especially when playing the game, that I couldn't resist keeping it.
Really happy with how things have come so far, especially considering how hard it was to do certain effects and making sure it's all running at a playable frame rate.
I hope you enjoy the short trailer. Stay tuned for more updates!