(UPDATED)
Hello everyone!
The progress on ‘Boiled’ is slow but steady. Due to Covid, works been a bit more, shall we say, unpredictable. I am slowly building up the project, but I’ve had a bit more time as of late, so I have dedicated more time to the project. That being said, here’s a progress of the game. There is no battle system in place yet (it’s coming), and things like the dialog box is still a place holder, but the pieces are slowly coming together. The day and night sequence is working nicely, interaction with the water and environment is at a place I’m happy with (for now), the scope of the world is something that I’m happy with as well.
The Story
The game will start out with you, a living being of energy, crash landing on the planet in a meteor one night. The moon has exploded a long time ago, and there are shards of meteors that impact the land from time to time, you being in one of them. At the start, an MPC will approach the crash site. As he reaches in to get a better look, he will come in contact with you, and immediately you will take over his body. From that moment forward, it will be up to you to explore the land, find out what you’re doing there, and what your purpose is. You will be new to the world, but it’s what you will now call home.
The latest video can be seen here: This is a short version with various shots.
[video]www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuODFieTLgg&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR2A5t3y1iSCuK0QymIYzTeBds2qsElvaGaYshf8J-4UNsB3B2rvrE7hzOI[/video]
The longer un-cut video can be seen here: This is still a WIP, so you will see various things in this version such as incomplete distance landscapes, a few mis-matching terrain LOD’s, and some oddities like the terrains LOD material not quite matching the final version in the levels once they load. This is due to changes, and the lack of LOD updates at this time, so please look beyond those details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoh7IAUwUUI
Hope you enjoy!
Hello again everyone!
I’m glad some of you really like the look and feel of the project so far (even though it’s in its very early stages) and have even reached out to me about being a part of it. I’ll more than likely need some help to complete this project, but like everything in life, it all comes down to finances. But I hope I can work with some of you in the future!
Until something like that happens, I’ve continued working on the project. I have worked heavily on the look of the game. I wanted to get the lighting and post processing looking and feeling more of how I envision it in my head. On top of the lighting, I also have been working on a weather system that has rain, splash interaction particles, automatic material changes so everything appears wet, ripples that animate on the top of assets and water that runs down the sides, and an atmosphere change that tweaks the fog, lighting and skybox. I have also included a new railing model to help guide the player and keep you on path (along with adding some nice complexity to the scene), and added to the bridge blueprint so they now have dynamically reactive ropes that move with the bridge when you walk over it (the models are placeholders on the bridge. The spheres will become knots, and the ropes will be textured accordingly). I have also put in a place holder for the exterior of the environment which isn’t final, but it’s there to give a sense of depth and scale. I have also done a number of performance boost along with fixes to some crashes. The lighting has also been updated so that there are dynamic shadows on the terrain that give the feel of clouds overhead. The skybox material doesn’t match this effect yet though, so the illusion is currently broken when you look up. You’ll also notice the material tweak to the lava, so it shows a bit more depth, and fades out at the edges.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy the update!
More polish have been done on the project. The clouds are in, and working dynamically with shadows casting on the ground and water. The lighting was also updated, trees and bushes were put in, fences were created, rope details on the bridges were updated which interact dynamically when you walk over the bridge, and a house to top off the update. There have been a lot of tweaks, but I’m happy with how it’s looking so far. Hope you guys enjoy!
Thanks Kanc! The clouds are actually relatively simple. I put a plane in the sky that is tessellated and displaced downward to make the edges of the clouds more apparent when seen on an angle, I created a material that is driven by wind speed and wind direction to control which direction it moves and how fast, then I have a ‘storm strength’ variable that drives the intensity of the clouds including colour and size.The same ‘storm strength’ variable is controlling the light sources light function, so when the cloud sizes increase, the cloud shadows increase in size as well.
I provided the cloud material here in case you want to duplicate the logic for anything.The first image is the cloud material itself, while the other is the cloud ‘cloudshadows_matfunction’ that’s on the lower left hand side of the screenshot.