First of all, and as shown above, I've reworked the look and "feel" of the stonework in the prologue level. For some time now I've been dissatisfied with the texture of the stone--by which I refer to its normal-map, not the image that defines its colours. Not only was I unhappy with its overall quality, but I also felt that it didn't fit the somewhat-painterly art-style that I was aiming for. All attempts to improve upon it produced results that, to my eye, were worse.
This week, however, produced a result that I rather like: in short, I painted streaks of normal-map colours, producing an effect that I feel resembles a hand-painted stone surface.
Along with this, I've been adjusting the UV-maps of the fallen stones around the pyramid to better fit their intended appearance, and to better use the new normal maps. This is a slightly slow and tedious job that is still in progress at time of writing.
Another major change has been the creation of a new puzzle-type, and the related removal (perhaps partial) of one of those already implemented. I recently discovered that one of my puzzle-types--a letter-substitution cypher--was rather more difficult than I had intended. While there do exist means of reducing the difficulty of such a puzzle, but nothing that I tried really satisfied me--the puzzle was either too difficult or too trivially easy, it seems.
Thus, while I may keep it for a few optional puzzles, I've decided to replace the substitution cypher with something new.
The cypher was intended to be an abstraction of the process of translating a text; this new puzzle-type serves the same purpose, and perhaps cleaves more closely to this intention.
The puzzle presents the player with a piece of text in a "foreign language", as well as a lexicon of word-roots that the character knows, along with their meanings. The player then matches these roots to the words in the text--each word may contain up to three roots. When all have been matched correctly, the translation is revealed.
Naturally, this is likely to be a little easy, so there is one catch: some of the word-roots overlap. For example, two of the roots might be "Er" and "Erli"; both of these might fit the word "Erlinen". However, by examining what other roots might fit beside them, and considering the context of the remaining words in the text, players should, I hope, be able to figure out which roots fit.
Over time, the character's lexicon may grow, allowing for the translation of a greater set of texts--but also leaving the player with more roots to sort through.
The puzzle has yet to be tested by someone other than myself, and is thus still unproven--I intend to rectify that during this week.
Moving on, a primitive form of "shininess" has been added to many of the shaders, allowing me to control, well, how "shiny" an object appears--previously all objects had a somewhat metallic appearance, which I feel wasn't very fitting. Take a look at the following comparison (taken before the changes to the stonework):
When one looks through the exit-gate, one can see the trunks of the forest beyond, and the bottom of its canopy. This region saw several changes, and I think that it now looks rather better than it did. Have a look:
Finally, both the grass and the tops of the larger courtyard trees have seen some tweaks.
That's everything for this week--thank you for reading, and stay well! ^_^
