Art work Update

Got some art from some fine talent lately. First one is a sculpt of the arms from the "arm puzzle." Alex is featured here, who also sculpted the Rachel, Janet and Stalker models. 

These are the arms that will be holding a cell door shut. They're a bit mutated, combining both flesh and plant mater. 

Steve gave us an update of a nicely done box. These will be used to store piles of patient's personal effects. I can even individually label these with an overlay effect.

Andrew gave us this model of a wall hanging blood pressure machine. Hard to see from this shot, but the display has glass cover. You'll be able to squeeze the ball and play with the need to some extent. 

Tyler is working on a model for what I call the "Dark Man" for the cell level. This is the first iteration so there will be some final morphing. 

Wasn't originally a character, he (she???) is just something that spawned from redoing the cells level about four times over now. Before I tried to do a smoke effect but couldn't come up with something that worked, then I tried a skeleton model. Decided to try something based a bit more on reality. Horror needs some grounding to the real world or else it just becomes silly. 

Next time I'll post footage of the first puzzle. 

Tech Update

The Normal Buffer Overlay Shader

Keith added a new shader that allows us to blend in a normal map into the background. The top left postage stamp shows the normal buffer blended in with the additional overlay map. This opens up the door to add a lot more character to the environment at minimal cost. 

So now we can add random cracks, water damage, bullet holes, and pretty much any surface detail without having to create entire new maps for each section. 

Design and Tools....

Since we got more help now, gotta spend more time on design and organization rather than pretty pictures at the moment. Can't stress enough how important a detailed plan is, and how current tools just seem to be so lacking. Google doesn't organize it's documents well, and I ended up spending more time looking for documents than editing them. And of course the team would all need to be added, shared, and what not, plus then you quickly run into space issues. I made a 3 page document that somehow turned into 27 megs! It was as if the images were being stored 5x over. 

So the solution? Why, create my own design system. Seems somewhat neurotic, but I've been coding for 20 years and sometimes it's easier to create a wheel than deal with the flaws of what's out there.