Dev Blog #40 - F.E.A.R.-style Flashlight, WIP Steam Cover art and more (Patreon)

Game Status

We managed to finish the 'Starlight Green' level today, and ReformedJoe's 'Starlight Blue' level is rapidly approaching its final stage. This is where we thoroughly test the level and do the final layers of polish for both sound and art to ensure everything has a unique flair. Each of these two levels take roughly 25-30 minutes to complete, assuming no retries with average exploration (half the secrets).

A portion of the art team was, unfortunately, absent for the past two weeks. One of us is moving to a new apartment which took plenty of time, and another artist got very sick, to the point that a hospital visit was in order. Thankfully, everything turned out OK in the end with a full recovery and no lasting effects. They expect to resume work this upcoming week.

This Patreon blog post will be a little shorter, because we are in the middle of things that we cannot show, but we will absolutely discuss things.

REMINDER: 18 months after using Patreon, the mobile app version of this platform still does not support GIFS. I have uploaded them here: https://imgur.com/a/0nzSzoJ

Steam Cover art

Selaco currently re-uses the Main Menu artwork for Steam's cover art, which is never something that really sat well with me. You essentially get to see the exact same artwork twice which I think does not leave a good first impression to newer players. Steam cover art is tricky, because it has to be very wide and none of our artwork is made with that in mind so the composition falls flat. We reached out to Dakota Lee, who also did the Fallen Aces cover art and the Blood collectors edition from Limited Run Games, to help us design something! This is a veryyyyyyyyyyyyy rough sketch of what we are aiming for.

I usually avoid going for the ''Main character does overly badass things'' approach for posters, but I think we managed to find something that worked. Selaco being an action heavy game, we needed an art piece that portrayed the action, a little appetiser before you boot up the game. It will be full of bullet tracers, destructions, smoke puffs and whatever else you would expect from Selaco. Will show more progress when we get there!

New interpolated Flashlight

The new Flashlight is here! We finally got rid of the simplistic Pointlight solution from the demo and replaced it with a proper spotlight. We always wanted to do this, but due to GZDoom's lack of lighting interpolation, it also looked rather choppy when you moved the camera around, since it could only update 35 times a second. That sounds fast, but if you play at a high frame rate, this problem will stick out like a sore thumb! This had to be addressed.

I’m sure that some of you have played Doom mods before where flashlights were used. They have been done a thousand times before within the Doom community but all of them are choppy due to the engines lack of light interpolation (which is not the fault of the modders, it’s an engine limitation!). Cockatrice addressed this by properly updating the lights between the tickrate, matching the frame rate. Being able to make changes like these is one of the many benefits of going standalone.

When working on a dark level of Selaco (literally! There's no light in this level), the pointlight got a little bothersome. It looked ugly and cheap, and that’s not how we do things. It needed more Selaco and less <insert super janky game here>.

After Cockatrice added light interpolation, I got to work on the actual flashlight and its effects. The result is a much cleaner, better looking light that takes far less performance than our previous solution. Take a look and let us know your thoughts below!

And of course, this light will cast shadows when coming into contact with full-height surfaces. Hey, you know we love Doom 3, we would not have this any other way! Of course, a moving shadow caster is slightly more expensive which will primarily be noticeable on slower GPUs, so the option to turn off Flashlight Shadows has been added to the Shadow Settings of Selaco.

Lets take a quick look at what the flashlight looked like in the current demo version:

The new solution is quite an improvement, right? It adds a lot to the atmosphere that a point light just could not capture.

New music

We have finished 2 new tracks this month, ''Siege Street'' and "Starlight Green", with the third one being composed as I speak. Lawrence has one again killed it for both of these tracks. So, behold, here is one of them! Say hello to Siege Street, a track that plays during a combat sequence in the third level!

(Pro tip: Crank the bass up high for this one, please!)

Listen to the track here! 

The toilet experience is complete!

With the brand new addition of destructible urinals, Selaco's toilet experience has been completed. At least for now. We also revised all the toilets in the Demo Level so keep your eyes open when the update launches later this year!

Performance

The effort to make GZDoom a viable engine for commercial releases continues! We've shown plenty of frustration with the way GZDoom loads assets during gameplay, and we continue to address that.

A while ago, we introduced Multi-threaded asset loading for sound effects, which ended up solving the majority of the stutters, which makes sense given how audio-heavy we are, but now we are also looking into multi-threading Texture Loading to further eliminate the stuttering. This is the last step towards this little project before we put our efforts into the actual game again.

We announced on twitter that we are looking for testers to help us test this engine upgrade in the near future. If you are a backer, rest assured, you are invited either way! We will inform all backers a week or two early so we can test it with a smaller group of people first, before rolling it out to the rest. Watch this space <3

Conclusion

Despite this blog post being rather short compared to the ones we previously did, we are making faster progress than we ever have before. Largely because ReformedJoe joined the team and I have been able to better utilise my time doing other things than just level design. My goal is to start working on the Mech this week and get the basics out of the way! For newer backers, We've shown the mech before in this blog post (Man, really going all-in on the URL's today!).

Thank you all for your continued support! Looking forward to the next one <3

Wesley de Waart