It’s been a little over 3 months since I started my project, and I’m torn between being proud of having a game of this quality and feeling like I’m not making progress. It’s tough to be the baker, the oven, the miller, the wheat harvester, the transporter, and the seller of the bread all at once...
So this is week twelve! This week, I added two new characters in preparation for the next part of the story: Cadmus and Tiresias, to perform a play of The Bacchae.
I also added an animation for forcing open the door leading to the village, along with some code to make sure the animation aligns properly with the door, then the dialogue, and finally the voice acting.
A bit of level design work too, for the entrance to the village.
I also redid the chest at the beginning of the game, fixing the opening system (which was way too complex I’ll simplify it).
While improving my palm tree models (adding subdivisions to the leaves, which were way too square) and tweaking the trunk material, I realized my bushes weren’t optimized and looked pretty bad...
I had actually been looking for better vegetation assets for the bushes for a few weeks. I finally decided to get a jungle asset pack with much more suitable shaders.
So I integrated the new assets and reworked the colors of the tall grass and for the fourth (or maybe fifth) time, I reworked my grass! I tweaked the tall grass to get a smoother transition with the bushes.
And the result is fantastic. Without increasing my polygon budget, I gained more detail, with thicker and more lively vegetation, not just the grass. On the other hand, my draw calls skyrocketed, so I’ll spend this Saturday fixing that. I did a small rework on the shadow cascades, and especially rebuilt a bush by merging several meshes together. I managed to get back under 500 draw calls (down from 2000), with a polycount of 5 to 10k but now 500 shadow casters, so I’ll have to work on reducing that.
I’ll also add icons to my in-game helpers to make level design a bit easier.
I also opened a Discord: https://discord.gg/Q3prrMMf
Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/@goblingames-r2d
