This week was extremely productive. I worked on and completed many new things as well as solving issues that had been bugging at me for awhile.
The first new thing I added to the project was something every game needs. A main menu. I wanted it to be simple and readable but also tell a story and mood. I did this through having the menu take place in an actual 3D environment. Yes it was more work but is very worth it in the end. I placed Scarlet's (first playable character) Hover Jet into a dilapidated garage scene showing it gathering dust. This helps build more of a narrative into the game with out outwardly telling the player what the story is. Which is both good as it allows creative freedom for the player but also for me, as honestly I'm not entirely sure how much and what the narrative is.
For the scene I had to make a simple garage prop set and walls. I kept it quite sparsely furbished. This is as I both don't want to take away from the main attraction of the craft, but also as not to clutter the screen when trying to navigate menus.
Garage Models:
I also ended up creating a logo, custom buttons and cinematic cameras that loop between four shots during the main menu. Here is my favourite for my new game: AERO RUSH.
Once I had got the main menu to a place I am happy with for now, I started work on a character and level select scene. This is still something I am currently iterating on to this day. It started off as a double carousel menu where you could scroll through and select the character and level. It looks like this:
As I have no other characters yet I haven't even approached how I am going to do storing the right player character to bring into the level and I'm sure it will bring me a couple restless nights of frustration. Anyway, it worked and so you could scroll through the levels and click on the one you want and it would load the scene. Simple enough, however I just don't really like it. It feels like a step down from the main menu and a lot more cheap and non diegetic in design. And so I have decided to split the character and level select scenes. So far my new work has the character select be a police line up, something which I think is cool and leans into the grunge of cyberpunk aesthetic. It also helps to back up why the main menu is so dungy and the garage seemingly abandoned. This is it's current progress:
There is still a lot of work to be done but as you can see I ended up making a model for Scarlet too. I took the hologram statue, gave her a helmet, hair and a new paint job and voilà: Scarlet.
I also ended up giving her backside a bunch of detail, which is unfortunately impossible to see in the character select scene but maybe ill incorporate it somehow somewhere else. The main way I went about detailing it was through noise and also ambient occlusion baking, which is where you bake the lighting and how shadows would form. Here's the map for her:
I then use this as a layer to add instant shading to her and give her more depth and realism.
The last thing I did was add cutscenes to my level. So far I only have incorporated it into level 2. This is done through cinemachine and using timelines to create a track that plays on load. It uses a dolly cam to fly through a part of the level and then shifts torwards the start line then finally blends into the player cam. I am pretty happy with how it has turned out although there is some hard snaps that annoy me and I am not sure how to fix. Here's a playthrough showing the culmination of my work so far. If you see white dev cubes that is me trying to create working AI.
Slowly but steadily making progress.
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