Hey everyone! All Neyyah adventurers, far and wide! I bring to you an artefact from the realms of Visionaire Studio 5! Dusting it off, it reveals this week's dev log on how I incorporate some new renders into the Visionaire Studio 5 game engine.
And it's a creepy corridor!
Not saying much more than that, but it's confined, small and I thought it would be great to bring this to a news update! I am still working constantly in Blender right now, building the Neyyah world, but now and again I'll be jumping into the engine to bring new scenes to life, which is always exciting, and as you will see from this dev log, doesn't always take very long, either!
I'm not wanting to reveal too much of a particular scene I might be adding to the engine, but it's fun being able to talk through the process required to make the game interactive in the screen-to-screen point n click style!
A lot of the time, adding new scenes into the game is a fairly straight forward process: it just requires the duplication of certain nodes, replacing the images in those nodes, and maybe the cursors, too! These need to match the navigation the player may want to interact with. The hotspots on each image contain this data!
The harder, trickier parts are where animations are involved, which react to certain conditions, which might be either true or false. This is when a particular image may be drastically different to say a basic left or right turn! Here's a good example, where various conditions are set for this scene for a variety of different hotspots!
Going back to the cursors used in Neyyah, there are a nice variety, and they built up over time, too. In this old test build gameplay you will see a generic set of cursors which I believe came with a demo game template from the Visionaire Studio 5 website:
. They were animated in some cases, which I acted upon from feedback relating to the animations being to distracting. I found this to be true, and preferred the more static, classic Myst / Riven approach! For me, this principle has actually worked in terms of the UI, as well. I feel the best formula for Neyyah is bringing its world, its art, the main screen, to the forefront, and having everything else simple and easy. The menu for Neyyah pops down on ESC. The menu screens are black / partially transparent, and this goes for the inventory UI too!
Pop down menu!
The inventory item screen - the transparency enables the player to still feel as though they are in the game world, retaining immersion!
The cursors have changed over time. Here are some and new designs!:
an old design for the default cursor
an old forward cursor
current turn left-forward cursor
Current default cursor - stands out the best against the main game graphics
The 90 degree turn right cursor
The 180 degree turn right cursor
The different cursors create a nice variety in the actions you can implement within the screen to screen point n click style environment. Unlike with Riven, the cursor changes a lot more, so the player should always be aware on what they can and can't interact with!
Thanks for tuning in, everyone! See you all in the next dev news portal!
- Aaron Gwynaire / Defy Reality Entertainment