Hello and welcome to our first devlog for Blighted!
Blighted is the first true 3D game we’ve created at Drinkbox, built in our own proprietary engine. Switching to 3D has come with plenty of challenges, but it’s also expanded what we’re able to do — especially when it comes to graphics and animation.
For this first (but hopefully not last!) Blighted project devlog, we’re going to be looking at some of what Michael Fattori, one of our visual effects programmers, has been doing to help make the game look like nothing else out there. Take it away, Mike!
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We’ve been hard at work on a number of exciting effects. There are a few too many to show everything, but we’re going to have a look at some that we think are pretty neat. We have a little test area that I like to mess around in and so we’re going to take a sneak peak at what sort of goodies we've got in there. For starters:
Light Shafts
Any good VFX artist knows the importance of lighting. And when you need some movement and drama in the scene, nothing is quite as nice as some light shafts!
We’re not sure if this is how everyone does light shafts (smh), but our strategy is effective! These ones are nicer than our old ones since they can intersect characters and geometry without appearing to “clip” through them.
Grass
We’ve had grass in the game for a while (it’s actually one of the first big effects we implemented), but we’ve also been doing a lot of optimizations on it to get a ton of interactive grass on screen rendering as efficiently as we can.
This scene has just one kind of grass, but we did a lot of work to get all the grass on screen to render in one large compute/render pass, even grass of different types.
Tentacles
Tentacles are another effect that we’ve been optimizing more heavily recently. It’s a lot of geometry and compute shader work, so we’ve been restricting the work to the tentacles on screen more aggressively. Luckily, we can do a sort of “screenspace binning” that lets us focus the compute work and rendering on just the active bins.
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Thanks Mike! You deserve a break. Go touch some real grass and some real tentacles.
These experiments (and many more) have yet to be poked and prodded by the rest of the team, so who knows what they’ll end up looking like in the final game!
That’s all for now, but let us know if there's anything you'd like to see more of in future devlog posts! If you want to keep up with future updates, make sure to wishlist and follow Blighted ASAP!
Thanks for all of your support, it means a lot to us! ːg2heartː