Archive:
I started designing the Moon Base and working out what I'm going to ste^H^H^H pay homage to. I had a quick scrub through the first game's Director's Commentary and was surprised at how many rooms were empty; purely for navigation. I want to keep things much tighter in this version. No empty rooms, if possible.
The Moonbase's rooms are named after the locations in Exile, which gives me 20 key-areas, but that's probably not enough. I'll need to come up with some more.
I’ve also started experimenting with the look and feel of the Wizball hub area. I thought floating plinths might be ok, but then immediately went off the idea once I saw it. I've been playing too much Zelda...
Binned yesterday's experiment and went back to Lumo for inspiration. Rather than use the old materials, I made some new ones in Substance Designer with a similar feel and palette. I'm still experimenting with the lighting / tone map, but this feels a lot better.
This will be the spawn room, which is fitting. It was the first room I built in the original game, as well.
Needs the plinth, and the door, but it's taking shape. I’m thinking that the areas to the side could contain arcade machines, to let you re-play the mini-games once they’re unlocked.
I'm not happy with the border around the stones in the wall, but I love how the bump-offset in the material makes them pop. I was going to tessellate the geometry in blender, using the height map, but that would mean lots of bespoke modular pieces. It'd look better (I do the same for a few locations in Maenhir), but this is easier.
Getting closer to nailing Zone 0. Remade the door from the first game, fixed up the wall texture so there's less gap between the stones, cranked up the bloom, lowered the volumetric fog, tweaked the lights, and made a big collection of dirt, crack, and edge wear decals.
Rather than burn in the dirt, I'm going to use the deferred decal system to make every room's grunge "unique".
I think this is looking OK as an update to Lumo's first zone:
Nearly done with the spawn room. Added a smashed Dizzy, a ‘Northern Lights’ wisp effect to the background, a remix of the plinth from the first game and settled on something I’m happy with for the lighting. Also tweaked the run animations, again.
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