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MNL Progress Report #79
🕑 Added 2024-04-28 03:56:14 +0000 UTCHey nudies! Thanks for not minding me skip last week's progress report. Today is also unfortunately going to be a sparse update since Invertex spent most of this week recovering from last week's decidedly not-game-related injury. He's officially back up at 'em as of yesterday, and we're right back to work! Whether it's game engine switches or head trauma, at nothin' keepin' us down!
As you can see in the above GIF, we've been tweaking the outdoor cafe area before. Originally, we had a little park on the other side of the road that you may remember from previous posts. Because of its previous layout, we would have had to raise the camera up and zoom it out a good deal to make sure everything was in frame. Here's a screencap of the old version to show you what I mean:
Can you spot the tiny gray Amber? While we wouldn't have to zoom out THIS far, we still would have needed a higher angle looking down if we wanted to really capture the scope of the area. I realized though that if we put the park on the other side of the road, we can keep the camera angle lower and closer to Amber and keep everything visible from a single tracking camera angle. That's what you're seeing in the above GIF!
What you're seeing above is just the basic level geometry without any of its decorations (trees, benches, whatnot), so by next week, it's going to look a whole lot better. While there's definitely an appeal in the top-down look, I feel it's important to be able to be lower and closer to Amber as she explores the town. With an angle like this, you can really enjoy walking naked under a nice blue sky... or a default blender grey zone, as it currently is. I swear it'll look better next update.
I realized also that if we stick to this camera angle for all city zones, it would be a lot faster and easier to build areas. This way, we would only need to build for what's visible on exactly one side of a street at any given moment. Think of it almost like a theater stage. You would still be able to zoom in and follow Amber if you were to walk off the road and away from the camera, but the camera would stay locked to this one side and angle. Zone transitions would be done at four way intersections - like say, if you wanted to south to the beach, you would walk down the road by the bridge in the GIF. Fourway intersections will basically act as zone transition markers.
While this makes creating city areas a lot easier, we can also break this camera rule in areas that are more open or more enclosed. A flat, low angle like this wouldn't exactly work for Amber's bedroom, for example. And a more open area can allow us to pull back the camera and really let Amber wander around and explore. But for tight city environments like this, we think this camera angle makes things much more manageable for us.
Posts like this are what you get when it's only me able to work on the game in a given week, lol. BUT, Invertex has been extremely kind and patient to teach me various Blender techniques so that I can have a stronger hand in designing levels like this. This tweak actually opened up a new possibility for a future zone! You might be able to guess it from the GIF... or not. But maybe next week when it has a few more details, specifically trees.
We'll try to have some more gameplay footage this week! We have to rework the walkable areas in this zone first, but I think we can knock that out fast. Here's hoping no one else on the team gets knocked out, either!
As always, thank you so much for the support! See you next week!
Comments
Vizman-7
Glad Invertex is doing better!🫂
