Legacy Projects: Araxxis Squadron

Because I'm a lazy blogger much of my past work was not posted, or was posted with only static screenshots and not videos. So I'm uploading some video content of old content just for fun.

This particular set is for a game called Araxxis Squadron, which I think goes back to early 2017 (maybe even 2016?). It's a crazy frantic arcade style space shooter. I actually still like this game, though it's a bit over the top and intense diving in for the first time. I think it was one of the things where as a dev you get used to it, but as a new player (or as me coming back to it) it is quite overwhelming.

Anyway, here are some videos...

Bleaktide Part 3: A Tour of Silverglade Village

Note that this is part 3 of a series. In this installment I take you on a tour of Silverglade Village.

Silverglade Village is a central hub where you can talk to townsfolk, collect quests and trade with merchants. You start the game at a wagoneer camp just outside the entrance to the village.

These foreign guards at the wagoneer camp don't speak your language and are of a grumpy disposition. Attempting conversation tends to agitate them. You can even get achievements for irritating enough guards.

The roving wagoneers aren't popular with the residents of Silverglade. Bunco the Shark is the first general merchant you'll encounter. He's a rogue, but not the charming lovable type.

There is a lot to do in the village and so one of the first things you're likely to do is to find and view the town map. There are various map types available to let you get your bearings and to give the world a sense of presence and permanence.

Oh looky, it appears to be a map! I wonder what will happen if you interact with it?

And there it is, a top-down view of the village and the surrounding dungeons. This is very much a work-in-progress and will likely be replaced. I basically took a screenshot from high above and then used Photoshop filters to try make it look like a painting. It's passable for now, but not great.

The villagers aren't always on the best of terms with one another and are prone to gossip and slander. Speaking to them allows you to learn more about the world and its history, though I suspect some players will simply gloss over the conversations (and that's perfectly fine). Some villagers will request your help and offer you quests. Others will happily trade with you.

This young rapscallion may not be well-mannered, but he's an amusing little chap.

The armor smith and weapon smith hang out at the smithy area near the centre of town. It looks like the Shadow Mistress is trying to flirt with the poor armor smith but that's not actually a feature yet.

There are various graphics options which can significantly modify the look and feel of the game. I'm not sure if I'll end up exposing all of the options since it may be overwhelming for players. Nevertheless, you may notice some images looking darker, brighter, gritter or with more glare.

Oh look, it's the town portal! If you're deep in the bowels of a distant dungeon but need to return to town to trade items and clear out your bag, this is where you'll pop out. The bloom option was set to extreme when I took this screenshot, hence the overwhelming blue glow. I kinda like it, but I suspect most prefer a subtler look.

Aw, she's an animal lover! Just as you can get achievements for harassing enough guards you can also get some for interacting with enough animals. If you look carefully you'll notice a big, juicy dung patty on the ground behind the bull. How revolting!

There are numerous treasure chests scattered around the village and its outskirts, many of them well hidden.

There are collectible items called 'skull doubloons' that allow you to be revive as a ghost at your current location when you die. However, if you run out of skull doubloons you'll be forced to endure the inconvenience of being revived here at the Silverglade graveyard.

That's enough of Silverglade Village for now. I have a bunch more screenshots but want to keep these posts fairly brief so I'll save them for later. In the next installment I'll discuss some of the development process and some of the technical aspects of the game.

Bleaktide Part 4: Game Development Process

Minor Updates to Surreal Landscape Demo

This weekend I did a but of work on my surreal landscape demo. I re-modelled the jellyfish (more detailed and better looking) and re-worked their animation (I'm just doing it in the vertex shader via sine and cosine waves at the moment).

I added some basic trees to get a feel of what it will look like once I start adding more foliage. I also added a bit more vegetation (cycads). I'm using instancing for almost everything at the moment, and so I'm using texture atlases (multiple textures combined into one image, with each instance able to use any of them). When setting up each instance, I randomly choose a texture offset which controls which image in the texture atlas is used. Each instance also has a random rotation, scale and colour modifier, resulting in greater variety whilst still keeping the number of draw calls to a minimum.

I also re-worked the way I handle bloom. Prior to this I had a very simple method in place, which I had hobbled together just as a placeholder until I had some time to do it properly. I was doing a Gaussian filter both vertically and horizontally in one pass as opposed to filtering first horizontally, and then vertically in a separate pass. I am doing it correctly now (separate horizontal and vertical passes) so as to reduce the number of filter samples required. Additionally, I wasn't performing the bright pass before passing them into the filter -- instead I was performing it at a later stage, in the final post-processing shader stage. This resulted in halos around dark objects, because the bloom buffer contained blurred parts of both bright and dark parts of the image resulting in darker parts 'bleeding' over into brighter parts of the image. This is now fixed (note that the screenshots accompanying this post were taken before the current fix, so there may still be minor colour bleeding present in these images).

I also decided to alter various post-processing parameters based on the time of day. I found that I could tweak the post-processing parameters to make the scene look good for certain lighting conditions, but that the lighting conditions differed significantly enough that no single collection of settings looked perfect in all conditions. I now have various sets of variables for use in different lighting conditions. These include parameters that control the bloom bright pass (bloom exponent and bloom multiplier), as well as parameters that control the very last phase of the post-processing pipeline -- contrast and saturation.

I find that after applying bloom some of the colours are over-saturated. Although I am going for a fantasy dream-world feel, I don't want it to look too cartoony, so in order to get the visual results I want I increase the contrast and reduce the saturation of the final image so as to give it a slightly more gritty feel.