Interspace

First of all, thanks for all your great support this month! I've been busy preparing the Interspace map for the playable build, adding a short tutorial section and interactive elements, as well as making the Consciousness be a controllable "character". Its all still very far from completion, but its a great start.

Next I'm going to work on a desert asset test map again (just to play around with reality changing mechanics), some character animation improvements, and maybe even will get to make a sergal model playable.

Here are some progress highlights:

The place where you start: the consciousness passes through this crystallic receiver and arrives into the world of the game right here.

Close-up on the receiver shader effect. Still missing particle effects though. 

Those receivers/transmitters are going to be used later as a generic in-reality means of transportation as well. They are not teleporters though, they are more like tractor/gravity beams.

The Consciousness is no longer flying like in previous builds of the game (do you remember that floating fern?) instead now it has a dash ability, you can charge up a jump and bunnyhop. 

Even though it doesn't fly, It has quite a satisfying floaty feel to it, while still using ground-based movement like other creatures, which means that there is a perfect opportunity to teach how to control it in the beginning of the game!

The abilities shown here still need more VFX, particle effects, and of course sounds (everything in the game needs sounds) to be more satisfying, but I think its quite good so far, of course there are still some issues with it being less responsive than it should, but we're going fix that soon!

Here I'm using jump and dash combo to get over the gap, then interacting with a button to raise the bridge, which gets you across to the place where you get to hatch from your first egg (which is later going to be personally laid for you by the Gatekeeper)

Bridge raising side view. Those movable crystallic platforms are going to be quite common in other realities as well, as its part of the ancient ancestral technology. These modular moving pieces are quire useful as walls, doorways, bridges, even jumping puzzles.

I made sure to write a good tool for creating those bridges anywhere it might be needed by just drawing a curve in the world. This GIF shows the activation of the pathway that leads to the Gateway island, which becomes your main hub area after your first expedition to another reality, which by the way completely changes the cold starry background to something warm and homely.

Attached is a high res panorama used for the header of this post! Hope you like the progress on this level as we iron out how the game begins