Hey Everyone!
It's been a while since the last Dev Blog. We've been busy working away at the first content patch for Light Repair Team #4. Yup, not another patch of just bug fixes and polish! This update will be bug fixes, polish and five new puzzles. In the last blog post, I showed off four of those puzzles. Unfortunately, for this blog post, you're only going to get one teaser, but you'll see more in the future. ;)
This is a work in progress shot of the environment of level 26. It's a river side nook in the industrial sector of New Corona. There's still some work to be done, so if you have feedback, let us know below!
(Warning, things start to get a bit technical after this)
One of the things that some people commented on with the first 25 levels is that they were all essentially looked the same. You were in a narrow canal in the middle of a city, you had to look up and around to see the differences. Part of this reason was that we didn't have the resources or time to make a lot of different environments, so we stuck with just the canal and varying different environments outside the canal for variability. Through the early initial parts of development, there was just one of us working on the game, doing everything. All things considered, I think it turned out the best that it could be.
Another reason for the canals was that we wanted to mask level transitions, so that when you completed a level, you weren't temporarily booted out into the SteamVR lobby for a second or two. This broke immersion and would've been happening far too often. So, we used something called level streaming to dynamically load all the maps into a single file, then effectively make them visible and active whenever we wanted. When the level was done, we just made them invisible and not active. Boom, no loading screens.
When you play the first 25 levels, your playspace physically does not move anywhere in game space. There's not teleportation tricks or moving you while the you've been faded to black. The world literally loads, then vanishes around you. Unfortunately, doing it this way means that we were limited in the art, as lights placed in one level, would shine into another level, even if both are hidden. The first 25 levels only have 3 source of lights, and that is the bar lights that you see in the canal. At the time, this was the easiest thing for us to do, given our basically non-existent resources.
The new five levels however, don't use this system, technically. We still use level streaming and we still do the fade-to-black transition, but we now, from here on out, will be reducing the amount of levels per-map-file, so that we can then spread them out. We'll be employing the teleportation trick to move you between the levels. This, in combination with having more time and resources at our disposal, thanks to your support, we'll be able to start cranking up the cool stuff for the game.
And thats it for this blog. It's a bit of a weird one, and I apologize for the delay between blog posts. We were just busy and there really wasn't anything too super exciting to talk about. Thus is game development sometimes. When we get closer to the launch of the content update, we'll talk more about what else is going to be in, and toss some more images out of the new levels.
Toodles! :ledgewindowon:
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