I spent the last month doing an art pass on another one of the major areas in the game. This area is called “The Graveyard” and consists of more or less what the name describes. Some of the earliest art tests for the game were done with this area, so I thought it would be fun to compare a very early version of the games aesthetic with its current look. (Some of the details in the old version have been hidden to avoid spoilers.)
I would say that the new version is much improved. The old version often did not read as a graveyard at all, probably because the only headstones featured are the strange puzzle ones.
This area exists in a snowy biome, which is different than anything I’ve currently built for the game, and required doing a lot of custom artwork. It was a bit of a challenge, but things went much smoother than I expected. It’s sometimes hard for me to believe that I’ve gotten competent enough at doing art for that to happen. I don’t really consider myself much of an artist.
One of the more fun technical bits to get right was the snowy grass, which uses a procedural technique to generate the patterns of snow and exposed grass. You can see a demonstration of its flexibility below:
One of the other things I did this month is much more secret, but is something that I’ve been planning for a long while. I finally figured out a way to implement the idea. I can’t tell you much more, but here’s a sneak peek:
I’m quite happy with the way this interior came out visually, but since I chose a different approach to lighting it, it has me thinking I need to rework some of the other interior areas to match this level of fidelity.
For the next month, I still have more areas that need artwork, but I also have some puzzle design stuff that I need to finish up. Mostly mix-in puzzles, but I also need to get started on prototyping some gameplay concepts for the ending of the game. Somehow after all this time, I still don’t have a proper ending on the game.
Taiji 