Hello. It’s been a few weeks, including a pretty disastrous week last week where between sickness, funerals and business stuff getting in the way, we managed to get something close to two days to sit down and actually work on the game.
Third Person Camera and Outside Lighting
After much messing around with third person cameras and the open world areas of the game, we’ve made another big decision to return to fixed perspective for the entire game, and instead focus on making our fixed cameras more ‘dynamic’ feeling and varied.
This means things like slightly tracking the player or moving to a follow position for small sections. This is the style used in the Resident Evil 1 Remake, and in many PS2 era survival horrors.
We’ve made this decision because it allows us to deliver a more focused and polished final game. It’s not too hard to make small, confined third person sections, but making larger areas that all fully connect is a a big challenge.
It doesn’t just mean more assets and development time, it means we start to lose the ‘feel’ of a survival horror game and have to start working in more mechanics to fix design problems.
We’ve also been looking at what sort of ‘feel’ we’re going for outside areas in terms of lighting. The easiest genre solution is, of course, horrors best friend: fog.
However, simply adding a bunch of fog to an environment is as likely to make it washed out and confusing to navigate as it it is to make it creepy.
We also don’t want the game to simply end up looking like a Silent Hill copy. Those classics are our inspiration but we don't simply want to copy them, especially when it comes to setting.
We’ve found a fairly simple solution to this - we’ll be setting the game at night, and during heavy rain. It’s still a genre trope, for sure, but it’s one that’s a lot more fitting to our own setting.
While it’s a myth that it’s always raining in England (We’re actually only the 72nd wettest country in the world), it does let us present a darker, bleaker environment while still allowing for easier navigation.
Spoiler Gap!
Spoiler Gap!
Spoilers: Dock and Church
We’ve had to backtrack on some of the work on these areas due the above, though luckily we didn’t get too far along with third person work, and the main layout of the areas aren’t changing:
We’ve also spent a lot of time on the dock trying to make small things like having the water work right, and we’re now in the process of putting the final shots in while Sarah works on replacing asset store placeholders with our own assets:
Dan has been finishing building the outside of the church, which is a little more complete than the dock in that it has several puzzles that have already finished:
Next (this) Week:
We’ll almost certainly be ‘finished’ with most of the church area, and hopefully the dock as well, so we’ll be moving on to more act one areas if we do get those done, as well as doing some testing and continuing to tweak those areas.