Devlog - Underworld

Figured I may as well post a devlog on some of the behind the scenes work. Originally intended to only give a few screenshots, but these don't give much insight in the stuff I had to go through.

Ghost shader

One of the reasons I quickly gave Bernie a body in the Underworld is issues with the ghost shader - it's basically the stuff that makes her look the way she does. Below, her old look.

It has many issues with the rim glow overlaying other body parts. Hair being too dark or too light, depending on the scene. And most importantly - she's missing eyes. The old shader didn't go well with those, so I simply had to disable them.

Making Bernie's head transparent resulted in the above - two giant eye balls sticking out. I tried making them transparent too, but the result was poor.

Another issue is that big empty mouth area in the head, which wouldn't disappear.

One of the few ideas (maybe the only one? I didn't have many) to fix it was making a new head model, but that's not really my thing and the results were hardly satisfactory. Fortunately, after some experimenting and blind luck I managed to hide the internal head parts while still keeping the head transparent.

These may be less glowing and spooky but at least allow me to show some emotion on the ghost's face. Keep in mind, it's work in progress and subject to change.

Points of interest

In case you're not on discord - I added a new point of interest discovery method. This should allow me to easily add more side content. Previous event trigger system in the Underworld had the issue of finding these points of interest.

You still enter the main locations, like Well of Souls, the old way. Points of interest, however, can be entered both by going to the location and closing the map or simply clicking on the POI.

Final travel destination improvements

Sometimes when arriving at the destination, the player would land slightly away from the red "X" on the map. This would cause issues with triggering events as the player was not in the actual trigger zone.

The map is exactly 1920x1080 pixels and each pixel is a coordinate. It's also split into a 30x30 pixels grid for easier management and travel path calculation. Each time we select a destination on the map, you mark the pixels/coordinates and convert them to the grid. Then the game checks if the area is accessible and looks for the quickest path. There is some random interpolation done to extend the journey too, so we don't just go from one grid cell to the other. That'd be too quick and looks silly.

The issue with arriving slightly off the "X" lied in the destination being affected by the random variation (interpolation). I now changed it to ensure we land correctly on the X.

On a side, not relevant note, I check if the area is accessible using a map mask.

When first entering the Underworld, the game compares the grid cells to the map. Marking them depending on the color. If there's at least one red pixel in the grid cell, the location will not be accessible.

Anyway, that's mostly it. There are some other changes like new locations, the labyrinth scriptwork and so on but I'll leave it for another day.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to let me know what you think too.

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