Arbiter - Monthly Recap - May 2021 (Patreon)

WHAT'S UP GAMERS?!

Hope you're all well! I just got my first vaccine shot (#PfizerGang) so I'm about halfway there before I start feeling guilty for not going outside again. Can't wait.

I spent the past month mostly working on different foliage and environmental assets, on top of minor bug fixes and such. I started out with the grass, which was inspired by this effect. Arbiter is very VFX heavy, so I want an environment that gets impacted by all the various cool shit you're doing. The grass will blow in the wind, bend to you and the enemies' movement, and ripple from various impacts and effects. It can even be cut! 

I made a video showing it all off here. It took a bit to get everything working but I'm more than happy with the result!

Next I worked on the trees and bushes, which I just finished last week. This was less intense from an interactivity standpoint, but I obviously wanted them to look good, so it still took some work. I took some light inspiration from Cyan on Twitter, who does all kinds of pretty shader effects and whatnot. They had a neat trick for handling the canopy normals/shading off of the shader rather than normal editing (which is pretty tedious), so I applied that method to my own trees as well. 

From there I did a fake subsurface scattering effect inspired by Edward del Villar's similar method. Aside from that, I just do my own custom gradient shading using my lighting setup. All in all, everything worked together to create what I more or less consider "passable" trees, hah. I'll be handling their different LODs sometime in the future.

Side note, but hopefully all of this is a friendly reminder that there are plenty of game dev mutuals out there with infinite resources to help get you started, even if you're only plucking a tiny piece of what they've learned. As I've mentioned a few times now, environmental art is definitely where I struggle the most, so having kind folks like these sharing their findings to make it a little easier for the rest of us is an absolute godsend, and I can't thank them enough.

At this point I'm pretty much just working on making different environmental assets to fill out the space. I'll also probably be fixing up my water shader sometime soon, and of course, I'll still be doing little gameplay touch-ups here and there in my spare time. 

Anyways, that about wraps it up for this month! I'm trying to do more combo videos too, so expect more of those to pop up on Twitter every other week or so. 

Cheers,
Jordy