Screenshot Saturday
It’s been a really exciting weekend for me. As some of you may know, I’ve been participating in Screenshot Saturday pretty regularly for about 2 months now, both on Reddit and on Twitter. Both places have been good venues to showcase some work-in-progress stuff and get feedback.
This Saturday, I shared this image below, which I made earlier in the week, and had posted in a previous devlog update:
It got some good response on Twitter, people were retweeting it and also commenting on the image.
I decided to share it on /r/indiegaming, the section on Reddit dedicated o indiegames. I had been lurking there for quite some time, but had never posted anything about Relativity, so had no idea what to expect. And to be honest, I wasn’t expecting much, just thought it would get lost amongst other posts, or worst, get downvoted to oblivion.
Instead, the feedback from the commutniy was really enthusiastic! It quickly became the most popular post on the subreddit, and I got a lot of response. Even RockLeeSmile, the Let’s Play youtuber, and Mike Blackney, who worked on Antichamber, commented.
Here’s the post: http://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/1uz7ig/escheresque_staircases_from_a/
Anyway, I know this stuff isn’t that important, and there’s still plenty of work to do, and a long road ahead of me. However, because I’ve been working on this game for so long by myself now, it can be really hard to gauge whether something I think is good actually is good, or if I’m just deluding myself. So for me, getting such positive feedback at this stage was just encouraging, and I felt like it validated my efforts in some way. At least now I know that I’m on the right track.
Portal
Ok, I’m starting to prototype some portal mechanics for my game. It’s turning out to be a little more difficult than I had expected. However, I’ve seen some pretty good working examples in Unity, so at least I know it’s possible. It just requires time.
My approach is to use render textures. Basically having cameras that point out from a portal entrance, and then rendering whatever the camera sees onto a texture, which is then placed on another portal door.
I’ll need to do some matrix transformations so that the cameras on the portal doors move according to how the player camera moves, so that it appears as if you’re actually looking through a portal, and not just a flat image.
This is just the visual side of it. In terms of actually teleporting player and objects across, I’m thinking I’ll need to use additive asynchronous level loading so that I can have two scenes open at once, and create the illusion of a seamless world.
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
Gotta start somewhere. 🙂