FalconGames

Continuing my development journey on this project, I have been making small bits and pieces that wouldn’t necessarily be enough to talk about on their own, however some related pieces have come together than I am happy with the look of, even if the models are just placeholders for now until the block out is complete.

After completing the block out for a graveyard, and doing some more research on level design, I found that ‘Safe Zones’ that can give the player some breathing room can add to the tension outside the safe zone by contrast.

I want this short game to have a foggy and eerie atmosphere so I played around and learnt about some of the worldspace effects and added some fog, we don’t want to add too much so that vision is hard and we don’t want too little so that it’s not effective. Adding a safe zone, I don’t want those parts to have an eerie feel to them, I want the player to have some breathing room, where perhaps they can save and regain some resources and know that they will be fine. To achieve this feeling, I wanted to get rid of the fog yet still make it feel like there is danger outside of the campfires safety, so when entering a safe zone, the fire springs to life with a “whoosh” and flickering visuals, the fog begins to dissipate and a shrouded veil surrounds the campsite which also doubles as stopping the player from seeing too much when the fog clears.

This effect was made through some signals that are sent when the player enters a hitbox and modifying variables through code, making the veil appear, removing world fog, turning on a campfire with its own code to make it flicker and feel alive. The effects are reversed when the hitbox is left and the campsite falls dead.

The Player also has a way to deal with the darkness in classic fashion with the use of a flashlight which incorporates a barely visible yellow cone to emulate the effect of a visible beam. I will talk about this item and the way its movement is achieved more when I discuss the Player Scene.