More work on the intro and outro, set dressing and missing parts of the game. But the lighting got a big overhaul and plenty new effects make movement more exciting.
This week I finished animating the Outro scene, addressing all notes and giving it a final polish pass. I also animated Pinda pulling on the dog leash. On the rigging side, I rigged the three bird characters, hopefully they will take flight soon.
This week I wrapped up the textures for Chocomel and Pinda! After that I explored some alternatives for the missing item iconography and messed around with the snow fx system, testing and providing some particle graphics for that.
My main goal for this week was updating the lighting. We wanted to get rid of SDFGI (which wasn't doing much anyway) to improve performance. I added many many more lights in the world environment to add highlights, more depth to shadows and individual areas of interest. I also detailed the set dressing in the south of the pond around the willow tree and the fence area.
This week, it was time to polish the assets texturing and adding normal maps to make the objects more tangible. Aside from this task I worked on set dressing the Clearing area and play-testing to see how the environment feels.
This week for me was focused on a mix of adding some of the more important initial FX and implementing the intro sequence, which nicely glues the gameplay to the main menu and also serves as a tutorial to introduce the player to the main game mechanics.
Another week of small fixes and implementing new animations. There was also finally some work on the "Gate Challenge" in the east of the level, as well as some improvements to Pindas logic.