Hello, everyone! How's it going?
Creating the Caverns
The caverns development started out like any other environment: with a concept thumbnail that tries to capture that level's mood. The caverns are a big part of Act 1. Despite not being too deep into the ocean, it's still pretty gloomy and scary. It's also where Dave will have his first boss encounter. As you can see below, with the thumbnail done and capturing the exact mood we intended for this place, we created a first render for the caverns.
Even though it looked good, however, we thought it had a bit of a fantasy or mystic feeling to it. The weird bright flowers, the purple walls and columns, the glittering floor tile and the unknown light source lighting the back wall all contributed to this feeling. Last Dive does have a mystical and enigmatic mood to it, but we didn't want it to be this early into the game. This first act is a lot more about being lost at the bottom of the ocean and the survival aspect of the game, so we wanted the environment to feel more realistic and believable.
From Mystic to Realistic
Based on this initial feedback, we worked on a toned down version of the caves, trying to make it match the initial thumbnail as closely as possible. The stones got more 'stone-like' colors, the light distribution got a little more realistic, and the background was adjusted to increase the sense of depth. In the first render, the further back wall had a bright color, and this made it look closer than it actually was. The overall depth of the first render was shallow, background layers didn't seem to be that far from the player. We wanted to fix this in the second render, so we worked on making the second back wall less noticeable, by making it darker and more blurry than the first.
That's it for today! In the next update we'll show the rest of the caverns' development process and it's result in game!
Thanks for stopping by! ;)
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