Going Down news has been admittedly light recently, and I’m sure some of you have been wondering why. Well, hopefully this dev log will go someway toward explaining it!
Before the release of the demo, we at Mytholite had several sit down sessions where we lamented the state of the project. The game just wasn’t as good as we wanted it to be, and that wasn’t okay with us. This caused a major pivot in development leaving us without a demo to show off. This lead to us crunching out a demo that we can’t honestly say we were proud of (and we’re sorry for that).
With that being said, I think it’s time to start showing off some of what we’ve been working on… like lighting!
As most of you gathered from the rushed demo we managed to push out, atmosphere is hugely important in Going Down. We don’t want to scare you with flashing images and screaming sounds, we want to fill you with a sense of dread with a heavy atmosphere. A big part of our recent development has been addressing how lighting plays a part in Going Down.
Lighting was important in the demo, as evident by the hints to Alice’s fear of the dark- however, the lighting still felt a little too flat for our liking. So we started playing with normal maps and a much upgraded lighting renderer.
There was another thing that we knew we’d have to work hard on to get right- mirrors.
Mirrors are also very important in Going Down, so we upgraded our reflection system so now even windows have reflections.
The old reflection system was a bit of a mess and didn’t always work the way we wanted it to, so we started over and landed on a solution that works a lot better for us.
As you can see, we’re working on a number of things that are often reserved for 3D games, to bring real depth to our 2D world. The atmosphere is really taking on a life of its own.
We’ll show you more very soon.
