Planned Tasks:
- Follow up on some emails for Hyperfocal Design + some back end “coding” 30 mins
- Writing up some notes on a friends game currently in development 60 mins
- Planet 2 Planning. What will the geometry look like and handle like for gameplay, what will the colors/lighting be like, etc. 2 hours
- Initial Planet 2 test geometry/lighting/color. 4 hours.
Hyperfocal + Emails
Took a little longer than expected, 2 hrs total.
Planet 2
If I had the budget, team, time etc I’d probably get a bunch of concept art drawn up per-planet, but I don’t, so I’ll focus on assembling a bunch of art and photos that somewhat capture the look I’m going for.
Here’s what I’m after, considering Planet 1 is mostly ‘nice looking’, bright, warm:
- General theme is still somewhat ‘nice’, welcoming, but cooler and more alien than planet 1.
- No sun, night time, visible night sky with intense, nearby nebulae, which lights the terrain below in a combination of red/blue/green.
- Harsher shadows, lit by EXO ONE’s light
- I’d like an almost snap-frozen ocean look, but am thinking this may be quite a lofty goal. Perhaps a moon-like surface as a backup plan… Since I’m kinda lacking time and resources, I’ll be doing this a bit. Can I get good, fast results? If not, abandon and move on, maybe return later :)
- As an object/flora theme I might try placing a lot of icicle/ice mushroom covered objects, which would have the added benefit of being easily repeatable.
Gameplay wise:
- Similar to first planet, with variations on geometry, mostly pushing more of the voronoi patterns than flowing hills. If I can get them looking anything like waves I’ll go with that. Otherwise it’s moon surface!
- Lower clouds, possibly touching the ground (will test!) therefore less height but more speed
- Fast moving clouds moving in opposite direction to goal(?) Play with having to move from cloud to cloud, or avoid them. Former makes more sense considering planet 1 gameplay. One planet may require the player to stay low/behind hills… could be this one.
- TBD whether we need more aerial gameplay.
Here’s the Pinterest board I made for “Planet 2”:
https://uk.pinterest.com/jayweston/exo-one-planet-2/
1hr
WIP
- Initial new scene creation – cloned Sagan4 and renamed some things. I feel like this is a terrible way to do it but don’t really know any other way! I think if I ever accidentally apply prefab changes to something I shouldn’t, I can potentially stuff things up across multiple planets… Doing prefabs for every planet seems crap too, because if I want to change something for all planets, the changes aren’t made everywhere… Thoughts??
- Putting some placeholder terrain in, then setting trueSky to night time.
- The tough thing here might be generally making a great looking nebulae skybox… I’m going to look at how trueSky’s is done.
- I’ll be replacing trueSky’s lighting with my own to simulate the light of nearby nebulae hitting the planet.
- Pasted in a nebulae from my reference quickly to check out the quality level etc. It’s pretty low for a 4096… probably not worth trying to do any detail apart from large scale color variations.
- Could explore other options such as high res nebulae billboards in the sky, but for now I think I’ll go for the in-built, mostly easier method.
- Just from this test it’s now super obvious I should keep the red tones lower, otherwise I quickly return to a ‘sunset looking’ color scheme similar to the first planet.
- I’m trying to use trueSky’s moon to give the clouds a bit of lighting from the nebulae, but unfortunately the higher I set the moon lighting, the duller the skybox gets (due to camera exposure)
- Reducing the atmospheric brightness fixes this issue
- Differentiating visually what is nebulae and what is cloud seems harder than I’d thought! But haven’t spent long yet on this. It’s just going to be tricky if I want to use a ‘low res/color wash’ style nebulae. This is made harder too when I’m wanting to use a foggy, low cloud layer. They both look quite similar. Not even worth showing!
- This part of development just always seems to take me ages moving sliders. Can’t get away from it I suppose… It’s fun and I enjoy it but it takes ages figuring out good settings.
- I’m now trying a more ‘iconic’ looking nebulae, rather than ‘a bunch o nebulae clouds’. So it’s obviously not terrestrial cloud… Thing is… All nebula is cloudy up close :P
- Here’s the sorta detail level we get from a sharp 4096, 16bit skybox:
Not great! I’m just currently slapping in high res NASA nebula to see what looks good or not! Starting to wonder if I’m going to have to bail on the skybox idea.
Breaking for dinner. That took me about 2 hrs of playing around.
More Nebulae
Again the Nebula for some reason just seems to look like red clouds in the sky. Unsure why. Perhaps because so often when we see nebula they are very finely detailed? Or it’s the Milky Way, which is super faint to the naked eye. I could also just be pushing the color too hard…
I’ll sleep on it!
Tomorrow, Per Planet Ambient
There is no light color coming down from the red nebula, so tomorrow I might either play with some reflection probes or per-planet ambient settings, so I can add in some red/pink light (using the above screen for example). Will help give it that colorful red/blue effect I’m after.
Bye-bye!