Showtime!

For the past few weeks the team worked on getting our main level to an Alpha stage. As I explained on my previous post I had been working on getting the game to look better and trying to give it a different look, I didn't want my game to look like it was some 3D prototype made in the 80s where all the lights had no smoothing and all the light changes were super obvious.

Because Zodiac is supposed to be a paper based game, most of the geometry has hard edges and sharp angle but that was making our game look very low quality in terms of modeling (which I strongly believe is not true). I studied a little bit about shading properties of paper and reflectivity values for it and I kept working with the illumination of the scene, my goal was to create that paper feel, rather than just jaggy bad rendered geometry. Unfortunately the level was not ready on time, our game designer took too long to lay down the simple traps and I didn't have time to get all the lighting in place; rendering lights and baking shadows can be a very time consuming process, especially when you are not an expert and you are not 100% sure what you are looking for. One big limitation that we also found was the poor capability that Unity provides for team work, I was planning on spending at least a couple of days playing with the light, testing and fixing errors that may appear but if I wanted to do that the entire team would have had to wait for me for because I had to work on the final scene and any other type of change that needed to be done would have had to wait.

The level was handed to me the same day we needed to present, I started working with it very early and I was able to bake some of the lights and modify the aspect a little bit. Unfortunately there were still other bugs that were on a higher fixing hierarchy so I ended up having to solve some of that. The game looks a little bit better now but there's definitely still a lot of stuff that can be improved.