Devlog #30 - Change the World
February went by fast. Only 28 days?? Terrifying.
Anyways, this month was a lot of smelly and boring (but necessary) work. There’s some improvements thrown in there, too!
🌊 More shaders in the sea
Long story short, we have slight depth of field in Snacko to help blend the horizon line together. One of the issues with this was the ocean used to be one big pancake. So, when it blurred the horizon, it would also blur what was immediately in front of you.
To fix this, we split up the ocean into a smol pancake, and a large outer ring. The outer ring now also has a “simplified” ocean shader slapped on to help with the rendering cost. You can see the seam if you zoom in or bring out the camera very far, like this:
You can’t see it in the usual game camera, though. This also had us fixing the horizon shader. It used to use your camera’s position to kind of give the edge that glow to match the sky. The issue with that was if you were very low to sea level, that edge would be way too wide. If you were high up, it would be almost nonexistent.
The solution? Simple works best. Now that we have that outer ring that’s separated, all it is is two colors blended together with a gradient.
The horizon color is controlled by a curve we went over two months ago. Easy peasy!
We also have all the trims done for the town as well. Here’s a shot of the town:
The pier has little round foam discs!
🌼 The floor is falling!
The other chunk of work that took up some time was the collision. Interestingly, we were watching a speed run video about Mario Kart on the Wii when they showed a screenshot of the game’s collision, and it was very similar to how we handle it in Snacko. It was a relief to know our method wasn’t dumb.
If you’d like to watch the video by SummoningSalt, here’s a link!
Why is it an actual wall with depth instead of a single plane in Snacko? Because anyone who has watched enough speed running will know that thin enough walls will let you clip through by jiggling your character around enough…
Even though I know if you try hard enough, there’s probably some way of getting out of bounds, I still have to try, right? 😢
There’s…a lot of collision. Walking collision, boundary collision, building area collision…
Included in this collision work was also making sure all the building areas in the farm and town were proper. This was kind of difficult for ramps, or areas where there was a steep angle. These areas had to be separated out and use different kinds of collision calculation. The payoff is nice, now you can place slanted buildables on these ramps!
Oh? My decorating skills are very good? Why, thank you!
Before we move on from the town, there’s also an event square now. The town square has area for buildings, the quest board, and the cultural center. The event square is where events (hah) will be held. It’s got lots of space for everyone to gather!
Right in the middle is this bunny statue, which was a Kickstarter tier. Recursive’s parents backed it, and they chose to design it based on his first favorite stuffed animal and book.
Very cute, right? I hope they choose something embarrassing for the plaque text.
🦊 No idle paws
We have some more work by Stefan who just finished some idle animations for NPCs! Sometimes, it was kind of sad to just see them stand around doing nothing, so now we have personal animations for each character that will randomly play when they’re just hanging out. Cute, right?
