In this Developer Diary I will focus on some of the visuals I have created and design choices. Mainly to establish a sense of style through consistency but also including experimentations.

The topic of my Bachelor Thesis is “Experiments in perspective, perception and the feeling of reality”, so you could assume that realism is the obvious way to go, but I strongly believe that it is not. A piece of media does not need to look real to be immersive, it is more important to be natural, believeable and authentic.

I am attempting to combine retro elemnts with modern rendering technologies.

Viewing Limitations 🔗

As part of the experimentation of perspective as well as a horror design choice, will the player be restriced on what he is able to see based on the view angle of the character, even though it is a top down perspective.

The Lantern 🔗

To defend of the darkness, the player will be able to use a lantern. I am avoiding HUDs as much as possible, so there wont be a direct information of how much fuel is left, instead there will be flickerin acting as signals.

I am also experimenting on the light cast on surfaces to have a low poly geometric shape to go along with the low poly meshes.

Bricks and Puddles 🔗

100 Unreal units / 1 meter will be equal too 64 pixels when it comes to walls and floors. The Floor on this scene is a tiling 32px textures. There are puddles scattered across it with a low resolution noise map and a heightlerp. The puddles utilize Planar Reflections, my first attempt on combining retro visuals with modern technologies.

Houses 🔗

I am working on a tool that will allow me to easily build different houses in the future. For now I am able to create single walls with adjustable segments. I have made a material that allows me to tile the wood segments fittingly, aslong as the building size is in 100 units steps.