Good morning boys and girls! We have to take some time off the Mercury Shift 3D and finish a different project.
So this week we still had some great stuff going on. The gamedesigners finished their work on the canyon levels, which means they are ready for art integration.
Part of the improvements added to the game lately is a new camera-orientation system. Although Mic has finished his work on that, Oli integrated it now in every level. It allows smoother controls over the camera. To implement the system, Oli, Beff and Matt worked out a set of rules for the camera. Visibility of points of interest, player movement and such things are considered in these rules.
Camera movement is one of those things that will not necessarily be noticed by every player. The only exception here being a bad camera movement system, which will throw you off the game-flow. Maybe you will spot the difference in this video. We have parallel-played a level with the new and with the old system. Although barely noticeable if you do not focus on it, it makes a difference in play.
The players are now able to see, where they are jumping and certain areas of interest can be shown to the player.
Relentless Mic has been collaborating with Simon to work with the death-areas. I am pretty excited about that collaboration, as Mic being a great coder and Simon a shader wizard. This time the two worked on the display of death-areas. They are a pretty important part of the game, as players will be confronted with them quite a lot. They come in a lot of different sizes, which makes it complicated to find an applicable visual interpretation that can be re-sized to all of your needs. You would have to create a lot of different assets for every application of the death-area.