In preparation for our upcoming launch on April 16th, we’ve been cooking up lots of new improvements to the game. There’s been a lot of bugfixes, gameplay improvements based on Next Fest feedback, and much much more. Today we want to focus on one of the bigger tasks, a big update to the visual identity of the game.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been testing out lots of different ways to improve the visual language. When tackling this task we had three primary goals:
Keep the identity of the game intact
Improve legibility
Embrace bold visuals
Previously the textures on the walls and the floor had a tendency to blend together, especially at a distance. This was rarely an issue for gameplay but we still felt there was room for improvement. Also, the levels didn’t have a ton of color variance overall which left them feeling a bit drab and boring. As such, all three biomes have received new materials that aim to better separate walls from floors while also introducing more color variance.
In the past, the plants we’ve had in each level were fairly sparse in part to reduce visual clutter and in part for performance reasons. However, as part of preparing for release we’ve been making optimizations in pretty much every part of the game. One of these optimizations drastically reduced the cost of rendering our plants which meant we could both add new variants and increase density. All this while still having an overall performance gain!
With these changes we wanted to make the arenas feel less barren and give each biome even more of a distinct atmosphere.
The final piece of the puzzle for us was a reimagining of the skybox. We’re very proud of the way our skies looked before so we wanted to keep their look intact while also making them stand out more. Our solution was to add a contrasting gradient across the sky that also lines up with the shadows in the level. The floors and walls also have some specularity to them at certain angles, the color of which corresponds to that level’s sky gradient. All of this combines to make a much more cohesive environment.