Hey guys,
Following up a couple weeks ago when I posted the first look at combat, I want to show you guys the huge improvements I've made to lighting and the general look of the game. I've spent a few weeks delving into post processing and optimizing shadows etc and I'm pretty happy with the look so far. Of course the screenshots are still heavily WIP, I'm showing off the improvements I've made to the forest biome but keep in mind I haven't added in elevation yet and most of the environmental assets are still from the old build, I may end up improving them as well but the focus now is more on lighting. I have also made changes to how I handle the "backdrop" terrain, for a while I struggled with natural environments but I'm pretty happy with the results so far.
Here is what the old forest biome currently looks like.
Here is my progress on the new forest biome with improved lighting, UI is disabled in these screenshots.
The armors are still of course heavily WIP and I'm only using placeholder weapons right now, the shots might look real cinematic but they are all in-game, they just use the cinematic camera that triggers on attacks. You can see there is a pretty huge difference, with shadows in and proper lighting techniques it really brings out the scene. So yeah progress is steady.
On the music front, I spent over a month sorting out a non-exclusive deal with a great musician called Marcus Bressler. The deal was settled a while back actually but I've only recently gotten around to putting all the tracks together as I wanted to bundle them in with some pictures. I made a video which is mainly just for me really, I like having a video with all the tracks compiled into one place. The soundtrack is over 4 hours long, there are more pictures too taken from the same scene that show off more WIP armor sets.
I am really happy with how the tracks came out as Marcus did a lot of custom edits for me to better suit my needs. For the longest time I was just using placeholder/generic tracks, they were a bit too "Hollywood" for me, I wanted to find tracks that were more gritty with more use of "authentic" or period appropriate instruments. So yeah, if you got a full day, why not take a listen?
That's all for now. Until next time!
Cheers,
Kevin.