Recently, about 99% of the work for our in game locations was finished. Mostly, this means the backgrounds our characters will be standing in front of, but it’s a little easier to say than it was to do.

Let me start by saying that I’m really happy with what our background artists, JelloPhish and Lana Liebert, were able to do with each of the locations. More than just a recognizable area, we were able to squeeze in a lot of little details and bits of a character that I think will make them memorable. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing but it’s a lot of work on the artists, not to mention my stickler nagging, so I’m forever in gratitude to these two who drew my visions to life.

Some of the locations have details that will evolve as the game progresses, such as extra elements appearing on the school hallway bulletin board. Some of the locations also have extra features, such as our cafeteria with its lunch line foreground element. These types of dynamics and elements all needed per location special coding and as it turned out, we actually ended up with more locations that needed some extra code than not. Our main school hallway was particularly challenging, as it contains those dynamic elements mentioned before but also was drawn to wrap, or scroll endlessly in other words. It’s also a very large texture and needed to be loaded in a special way to be compatible with our (admittedly ancient) content processor.

None of these things by themselves are troublesome but problems arose when combining them. The dynamic elements could not be implemented by the same means as it was done in our bedroom background, for example. Once everything was completed, we also found some issues with scrolling the background fluidly in a way that looked presentable at various resolutions. A minor motion blur effect was added to smooth this out. It’s a largely subjective issue (and a per display issue), so this will be adjustable in settings by some manner, including the ability to disable it entirely. I think disabling will be fine at higher resolutions, personally. Still, this minor addition and its options meant coding up an add-on to our renderer and compiling an effect used in just two locations. Ain’t nothing ever easy, is it?

But it’s all (mostly) done and that means I can divide my attention to just 9991 things now. Look forward to more things being completed! Like and give us a follow for more frequent updates!