Big news everybody! Midnight Hub will be at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco 2017! If you want to try a very, very early version of Lake Ridden, please drop us an email to: press@midnighthub.com to get in touch. Our creative director Johan and I will be arriving on Friday the 25th of February, and going back home again on Saturday the 5 of March. Our mission is to get feedback on the demo from other developers, to meet with the press and to expand our network. I’m so excited about this, it’s gonna be awesome! Johan has been to GDC a couple of time, but it will be my first time <3
Last week we promised you we would start digging into the lights and shadows of the game, making sure they did not look like crap anymore. Our light settings have been quite broken for a while now (making the artists understandably stressed). As you may have noticed all the light (both natural sunlight and man-made light like candles) looked quite off, and so did the shadows. We’re now in the middle of tweaking this, hopefully making it look less like crap before we head of to GDC…
Here are some work in progress from our artists; Erik and Anton. Expect things to change quite a bit before we’re even nearly satisfied with the way Lake Ridden looks and feels!
Night time in Lake Ridden. The player will experience different times of the day as she plays. Mmmm look at those shiny stars!
The Garden. Experimenting with light conditions for a sunset.
More sunset-lights. As you can tell the water is not something we have put a lot of time into (yet). Getting the lights and shadows right can take some time.
The ground in Lake Ridden still missing most of the grass, foliage and bushes.
More experimenting with what the natural light will look like during night time. Too much light and the night will feel bad, too little and the game gets too dark and confusing.
The sun is setting over The Garden. As you can tell almost all shadows are still missing. The Art Team also had some time to polish the textures and add more objects into the game since last week. This whole scene will really come together when we nail the lights and add some good looking water to that small pond!
Like I said, there’s plenty of work left on the lights and shadows before Lake Ridden looks all juicy and crisp, but we’re getting there, one frame at a time. Making things look good is not only the work of the Art Team, but also the results of our coders Malin and Johan. We’ll keep you up to date with the progress as always : )
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Cheers,
Sara & The Team