Jimmy Swanick | We're building a game I swear

This week we made a focused effort to finally transition from design discussions and planning to actual, concrete development. This came at about the same time as our transition from git to perforce. 

These two events are at odds with each other, so far.

Moving into this week I was making speedy progress with a variety of visual effects, lighting tweaks & adjustments, and particle effects for this project. When the latter half of the week arrived, it was time to merge my progress with the latest state of the team's repository. We'd just switched to perforce, though, despite that not everyone (myself included) had successfully got Perforce working. For the following several days, I ended up spending all of my available time to work trying and *mostly* failing to convince Perforce that I am the owner of my own workspace, and that I should be allowed to resume my work from the previous day when I sit down to work. 

Perforce did not agree. I spent almost as much time this week trying to get perforce working as I did getting work done. Progress for myself and everyone else seems slow.

 I was only able to submit one new visual effect to the Perforce cloud workspace before getting locked out of the project entirely:

Portal Cards!

One of the biggest problems with our game visually in the past has been that the lighting of our levels was so dark, that dimly lit spaces that weren't very close to the player were typically very hard to distinguish. Dark corners, hallways, and doorways were generally just blobs of dark color, making navigation very much more difficult, and the aesthetic more incomprehensible than moody. 

I learned of a great solution from a GDC talk about Abzu, where they used a tool they called "Portal Cards" to highlight and polarize the colors of distant dark spaces.   

Here's the point in the talk where they show their Portal Card in action.

Using some complicated math, a few similar examples from forums about shaders, and some glue, I put together a portal card shader that could imitate a similar thing. I even added the ability to have a texture scroll across the surface of the card to warp it or color it, so achieve a sort of smokey or ethereal effect just beyond a doorway. 

I managed to get the supporting prefabs and materials into the project, but didn't keep perforce working look enough to work it into any of our demo levels. 

BONUS: I discovered, somewhat embarrassingly, that our performance issues may have been caused by the fact that each of our textures and normal maps were imported at 2048 x 2048 resolution. This, combined with the fact that each one was applied to small 1 x 1 meter tiles that occurred hundreds of times in our level, meant that we were potentially rendering several hundred 2k textures constantly. My game started running smoothly after I reduced each texture to max 256 x 256, which is much more appropriate anyway given their size in-game. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Thursday story meeting (1hr)
• Thursday Level Design meeting (3 hr)
• Friday general meting (3 hr)
• Portal Card Shaders (7 hr)
• Research: Vertex Displacement with Texture Noise (4 hr)
• Fisticuffs vs. Perforce:  (8hr)

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• An exciting and vital visual improvement for the incoherent distant dark areas of our environments.
• A solution to our performance issues, finally.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• A lot of time spent trying to debug Perforce instead of getting development done.

NEXT TASKS

Fix perforce, and get back to implementing visual effects. The next things I'm working on are the Xray Portal shader/particle effects, and a not-so-visual-but-very-important improvement for the way that our doors work. 

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 26  hours