Long Time No See!

It's been too long~

It's been quite a while since I last posted anything, my bad! I took Reading Week off to study, unwind, sleep; the usual. After that was the week of midterms and I just completely forgot about blogging. I'll try to make it up this week and, now that I've remembered about blogs, I certainly won't miss another one! (we hope)

Mole Enemy

This week I've been pretty busy in trying to create some more content for our game. I mentioned on a previous blog that I'd been working on this little mole guy and he's now fully modeled and textured. I think he turned out pretty good and I'm looking forward to seeing him implemented in the game as the little nuisance I imagine him to be >:]

Bird Enemy (WIP)

 The other one I've been modelling for the past couple of days is just a semi-realistic, eagle-type bird I based off of some real photographs. I plan on texturing him in the same manner as the other enemies to help tie them together; vibrant colours, chunky textures, painterly shadows. He'll probably be a reddish-brown with a bright yellow beak and eyes. He drops things on the player, probably rocks, as he flies through the level and pesters the player. I seem to like enemies that really annoy our poor player, whoops.

Other than these two models, both of which I'm pretty proud of for different reasons, I also recreated the font for our UI and menus so they were higher quality and a little less... curly.

Screenshot of our Toon Shader

Toon Shader Code

Above is a screenshot of our protagonist model being lit with the simple Toon-style shader that our Lead Programmer Mark has been working on. It's not 100% definitely the shader we'll be using, but it looks pretty sweet! I think adding outlines would detract from the aesthetic of the game that we have going so far, so the other option would be a more realistic lighting over this Toon shading. We also plan on adding some form of bloom in game and rim lighting behind the main player, but we will definitely (read: hopefully) having the lights move throughout the day/night cycle that our backdrop goes through. The colour of the light will also adjust depending on the time of day, such as a cool, bright blue for night lighting and a vibrant yellow-white for regular sunshine.

The code is actually stupidly straightforward in how it creates the sharp contrasting shadows. Depending upon the degree of diffuse lighting on an area of the model if it's within a certain range, it's set to one value. ie if the diffuse value of a point is between 0.0 & 0.2, it is set to a factor of 0.2. This makes that sharp contrast between a 0.2 and a 0.5 area, for example, as there are no values in-between that remain visible. The colour of the light is also applied at this stage, and the specular calculated for the shiniest of areas.

All in all, our game is coming together nicely if at a slower pace then I'd like. But it's crunch month! If there's such thing as just the right motivation to finish our game, it would be known as Crunch Month~