Greetings and salutations!
Before I begin, an announcement regarding the "and" section of this post's title: The annual "Week of Awesome" game-jam is running on GameDev.net (and this year on a dedicated site, too), and once again I mean to enter.
This means a few things, as I believe was in previous years:
First, I intend to focus on the jam during the week, and thus won't be working on A Door to the Mists. As a result, there will presumably be no blog entry next Monday.
Second, I intend to post daily blog-entries for my entry.
All that said, on to this week's entry!
For this week's screenshots, two things, both found in the lower tombs. The first is a bit of love poetry, found in one of the double-tombs. The second is a magical hand-mirror--completed now--filled with shifting colours, from one of the "private" tombs.
One again, the week just past was focussed on filling out the lower tombs:
First of all, as shown above, I completed the magic mirror that I believe that I mentioned last week. It's a collectible item, and while its function is unclear, it's at least pretty to look at! (I find, at least.)
I mentioned last week that shaders may now be specified for parts of a game-object's model. In addition to this, I've implemented support for certain tags to be similarly observed, allowing me to specify such things as transparency for such parts.
The mirror's "shifting colours" shader has also been applied to the collectible brass bowl found in the prologue level--although here it's rather more subtle. It's a change that I've been wanting to make for some time, as I recall, enabled now by the ability to have shaders and tags loaded for game-objects as well for level-geometry.
(I also touched up the normal-map (and concommitantly, the UVs) used for that brass bowl; the centre of the bowl looks rather better now, I feel.)
Another change can, I believe, be seen in the GIF that shows the mirror: I've flipped the lighting on the majority of the game's UI elements; they are now lit from the upper left, not right. I did this, as I recall, because I encountered an issue with the lighting of said mirror, which led me to discover that the lighting used for viewing inventory items (including collectibles) was inconsistent with that of the UI elements around them.
At first--and I did this not in the week just past, but the one before--I tried flipping the lighting in the inventory, and along with that switching the side on which the player-light was carried; it seemed like the easier option. However, I wasn't satisfied: it felt a little odd (perhaps just because I was used to its previous placement), and didn't fit well with the protagonist being portrayed as right-handed. So in the week just past I instead flipped the lighting of the UI--a tedious but not terribly difficult job--and re-flipped the player-light and inventory lighting.
This means that the inventory lighting, UI lighting, and player-light should now all more or less match up. When outdoors, the UI and inventory may not match the sunlight, depending on the player's orientation, but that doesn't worry me overmuch.
Continuing in the vein of lighting, I've been experimenting with the additional blob-lights mentioned, I believe, in last week's post. I'm not yet quite sure of how I feel about what I have, or quite how I want to use them. My intuition and inclination is somewhat naturalistic, but exposure to a number of less-natural but very cool-looking images has me tempted to do similarly.
As shown above, I did a little writing for the level in the week just past. In addition to the poem in the screenshots, I wrote a journal entry that provides some information on the people interred in the tombs. It hasn't yet been included into the level yet, however.
I also implemented the translation puzzle for the poem, tasking the player with translating a line of the text. As part of this, I made some tweaks to the "lexicon" and grammar used for these puzzles, and fixed--I hope--a bug discovered in a related design-utility of mine.
Speaking of the poem, it prompted me to create a new game-object class that handles the apparently-common case of a document which should be translated before being read, but which is otherwise primarily a legibile document. The implementation was fairly quick and easy, as I recall, and this class may prove quite handy to have.
Finally, as per usual there were other changes besides those mentioned above, but which don't seem worth mentioning here--especially as this entry is getting a bit long, I fear!
So then, that's all for this week! Stay well, and thank you for reading. ^_^