Hello everyone!
Yet another 2 months have passed since my last update on the state of Mall Craze, and there is quite a number of new screenshots that I feel are really worth sharing. Just a quick reminder before I move on - since January this year, I'm rewriting the whole game in Unreal Engine 5 and C++, so If you've been following the development for some time now, a lot of these features mentioned today will be falimiar to you.
Where we left off last time?
This is the last screenshot that I shared with you in March. It shows a system where 2 different shops can share a single wall.
Since then, I've been working mainly on these 4 things - Customization, Lighting, Shops and Products.
Customization
Visual customization is an important pillar of Mall Craze. If you've played the current demo (that is still build on Unreal Engine 4 and does not represent the current state of the game), you may recognize these two windows:
The first one is for customization of objects outside of shops, while the second one is for customization of objects such as shop entrances, windows, and so on. There is also a third window for customization of products.
As you can see, this works (in a sense that it does what it's supposed to do), but it's not really user friendly. It is basically the same thing only done in 3 different places (that are all accessed differently as well). Not only am I rewriting the game as it was, but I'm also trying to improve things that can be improved. My main goal for customization was to unify the customization process.
Let's look at what I came up with:
Do you want to change a specific color of an object, let's say - a color of the floor? Or do you want to change the complete style of the wall? This is now the place where you'll be doing all of that. No matter if it's a wall, product, or a bench. A lot of things are improved, and customization is now much faster and easier.
The main difference is that you can now change not only the color of the material, but the whole material itself. Namely these paremeters: Color, Roughness, Specular, Metalic and Emission.
Where can this be used? A nice example can be a ceiling where you increase the Emissive parameter and BOOM! You now have a ceiling light!
Pay close attention to other screenshots in this update, because you can see the new materials in action in almost every single one.
Honorable mentions:
- Create your own colors using Hue, Saturation, and Value
- Use recently created colors
- Easily copy whole materials between individual materials or different objects
- Paint similar objects with the same materials and design (bucket paint implementation now improved)
Lighting
Specifically - Volumetric Fog (or as I would call it, the "Look cool" button). There isn't much to talk about, so I will just let the screenshots speak for themselves.
Shops & Products
I also added the 4 current shops (and their respective products) into the game. Those 4 shops are Electro, Clothes, Music, and Sports shop. I've also made some small changes to the way the products are build, but I will cover that in the future.
Now, this is the time that I've been waiting for the most in this update. What does it look like when I combine all these newly added things together? :)
To wrap this update up, let's compare the graphics of the current demo to what's coming in June:
It was nice taking a break to write this update, but June is right around the corner and I should head back to Unreal to do some more work :)
Have a great day everyone!
- Milan, developer