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BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG
Our Secret Visible Enchancment
Hey people!
Welcome to the primary BattleJuice Alchemist devlog of 2024, the place we spill some beans on how we spiced up our headless lorekeeper, Dullahan. This one’s for the tech nerds, however I promise it is cool even when you’re not into the nitty-gritty stuff.
So, Dullahan is that this mysterious outdated, headless woman who lives amongst her scrolls and ravens within the supernatural realm surrounding us, the Crossroads. Our artist, Patrick, had this concept to take it up a notch technically. Dullahan ought to have a flowing cape and candles on her again.
Often, we use solely a single texture, which determines the colours for a personality. In fashionable video games, a 3D asset often has a number of textures: There’s something referred to as PBR (Bodily Based mostly Rendering), the place you add textures offering the data on how bumpy or reflective a floor is. We do not use PBR as a result of our sport is all about that hyper-stylization. However Patrick got here to me with this plan – add a second texture file that shops totally different data.
The brand new file tells the engine how wind ought to mess with Dullahan’s cape and the way a lot the candle’s flames ought to glow.
Wind Results (Blue Channel): Dullahan’s cape is swaying within the wind, despite the fact that our animations are so simple as it will get and the cape will not be animated. It simply strikes, the place we paint blue into the brand new texture. That is the magic of the feel’s blue channel proper there.
Glow (Purple Channel): Dullahan’s candles now glow. There isn’t any particle system, only a easy aircraft for the flame as a part of the 3D mannequin. It strikes, due to the blue channel and because of the crimson channel, we are able to crank up the glow depth in particular spots. With our post-processing utilized, Dullahan seems like this:
We are able to even broaden on the system by making use of the at the moment empty inexperienced channel and the alpha channel of our new texture in a while.
“Why secondary movement?” it’s possible you’ll ask. Our animations are intentionally easy, however throwing in some secondary movement is like including a sprinkle of magic. It is the explanation puppets like these in Sesame Avenue usually have fur – additional movement that makes the character extra vigorous and doesn’t should be animated manually.
Patrick’s concept turned out to be nice, and I’m glad he nagged me to implement it. Take a look at Dullahan inside the sport:
As we maintain pushing what we are able to do with such a small staff, these tech tweaks assist us maintain issues fashionable but immersive. We’re stoked about how Dullahan turned out, and we hope you agree.
Stick round for extra behind-the-scenes shenanigans and thanks for studying!
Alain
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