Lighting and Visuals (Patreon)

Greetings!

I've been continuing work on 0.9, which mostly consists of writing and eventing at this point. While I can't really show you what I've been writing yet, I've worked on a few other things I can show you! The first has to do lighting.

Lighting

Lighting is a pretty important thing in games. It helps establish mood, defines the environment, and just generally sets the tone for player experience. It's more important in 3D games, but it's still a big deal in the 2D sort. While working on 0.8, there were a few parts where I'd wanted to experiment with lighting - The Oracle's area and Jovi's Family Farm - and after a bit of looking I found a good plugin for it and put together some lighting that I thought really enhanced those areas. I didn't notice this until I'd almost released, but it turns out that the plugin didn't work with existing saves, only with new ones. Load an old save with those plugins active and the game would immediately crash. That made it a no-go for me, since I didn't want to screw you guys out of your saves just to implement an admittedly cool feature. So, I went back before release and either implemented lighting some other, lesser way or removed it altogether.

Fast forward to now and I'm working on the nightclub for 0.9, which is another area I thought could really benefit from lighting effects. So, rather than simply accept I couldn't use that cool plugin without breaking existing saves, I figured out why it broke saves and wrote a helper function that modifies your save data as it's being loaded so that it will work with the lighting plugin.

TL;DR: I got lighting working. First, I'll show you the Oracle's area. Now, the Oracle's room was supposed to have a slightly creepy vibe, like you're in some spooky ancient crypt (a late Happy Halloween to you, btw!). The first two pics are what the Oracle's pad looks like in the current release:

And here's the way it looked when I originally designed it (and how it looks again, now that the lighting works!):

Pretty cool, right?

...

I guess I'll understand if you're not quite as excited about it as I am. But I am pretty excited. 

Anyway, the 'So what?' behind all this is that I'll be able to do interesting stuff with the lighting now, which should make for a more interesting game experience overall. 

Game Aesthetic

The second thing I have to show you has to do with character designs and general aesthetic. As you may have forgotten if you haven't played the early part of this game in a while, characters in the 'real world' are rendered in what I'll call 'typical Daz' style. That is, they look like vaguely uncanny, somewhat off versions of real humans. (Except for the hair. The hair usually looks really off.) While it's impressive technically, I really hate this style which is why I spent so much time developing the 'cartoony/stylized' style before my first release. Without giving too much away, I'll just say that the player will probably end up back in the real world toward the end of the game, and I was having a hard time getting excited about making typical Daz stuff again.

Then it occurred to me: why not make the whole game in the stylized style? I'd originally thought it was good to have a strong visual contrast between the real world and the game world, but now I'm not so sure that's important. Certainly less important than the huge shock you'll feel when going from the cute, colorful visuals of Zameroth and [REDACTED] back to uncanny valley Daz-world.

There's actually a reason I'm thinking about this now rather than closer to the end of the game; I don't want to give anything away so I won't tell you what it is just yet, but you might be able to guess once you've played 0.9. 

So, I thought a bit about what the male version of the player character should look like in 'stylized' style. I made a version of him for the succubus scene, but I wasn't entirely happy with it so I decided to give it another shot. Here's what I came up with - on the left is the original 'real world' version of male Alex, and on the right is the new one:

On the left is the version I made for the succubus scene, and on the right is the new version:

The 'old' version is a little noisy since I didn't render it to a very high sample rate, but I think the new one is a big improvement. And just to see if the visual style looks okay compared to female Alex, here they are together:

I could have done more with the expressions, but this was just meant to be a quick test. Anyway, I think they look good together!

I'm fairly pleased with it overall. So much so that I'm fighting the temptation to go back and re-do the succubus scene with this new model! I would like some feedback on all this, though.

First, do you think I should get rid of the 'typical Daz' stuff in the 'real world' and make the entire game in 'stylized' style? I wouldn't be looking to do this until 0.10 or so, so don't worry, it won't delay 0.9.

Second, what do you think of Alex's male model? Do you prefer the one from the H-scene? Do you think he looks too feminine? I don't think he does, but I wonder if some folks might think so.

Please let me know what you think, and thank you for your support!