New environment, graphics & working on UI

I don't have anything spooky prepared for today's occasion, simply didn't have time left to do anything for Halloween... But instead time was spent on working on more long-term things this month, despite many obstacles... All getting closer to making the new pre-alpha build, it just requires a lot of things to be done before we can finally hit "package game" and upload it for everyone to try.

My computer broke down earlier this month (PC is back up and running now by the way), and while I was waiting for replacement parts to arrive, I couldn't do much but to model and make some textures on my old laptop, so that's what I decided to do... And the screenshot above is the result of that process, plus a lot of math for programming the shaders afterwards (its 4k res, you can right click & open the image in the new tab  edit: this no longer works it seems, instead i uploaded them as attachments at the end of the post.)

From this moment we officially replaced every single bit that was in the game in the first build.  It's a different, better game now. And the only thing left that is the same from the previous build is only the water shader and the core codebase, everything else is something you haven't seen before. 

Graphical stuff that was created this month:

• New universal material system that accepts any texture onto any surface in any environment material and it "just works" (can make a bush out of sand if need be, I tried that and it looked weird but ok xD ) And just as before all textures are stored black and white and colorized on runtime, allowing each level to have a unique color palette without creating additional textures and require a lot of HDD space & memory.
• New textures, they are made in Substance Designer, which improves how they look, they have height and normal maps. Before textures took me a lot of time to paint by hand and didn't look as good, they also didn't have normals or height. If you're wondering what any of that means, just look for the details on the screenshots.
• New terrain material with stylized custom height based blending, tessellation and displacement, which makes it appear to have 3D details, rather than flat texture.
• New grass which is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild, it is very tall, dense, individual blades of grass wave on the wind that rolls through the grass field like in anime.
• New foliage shader and a workflow to make stylized dense bushes/leaves/tree crowns in the almost effortlessly in the future.
• New rocks which were procedurally generated in Blender, with a lot of LOD optimizations. Established a workflow to effortlessly create more in the future.

Now all that in motion

Grass is not just waving in abstract way, the wind is rolling through the grass like its often drawn in Ghibli movies.

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Aside from pretty environments, some work has been done on User Interface, as the previous UI we had is completely removed, we gotta to re-create it again, make a new, better one.

I already posted the new UI design before ( https://www.patreon.com/posts/ui-redesign-new-20725645 ) and now we're implementing it into the game, bit by bit.

Slider, regular button and text input field. Basic interactive UI elements.

Drop down list, toggle "checkbox" and a box with slanted corners. The last one is not interactive but quite interesting because it randomly generates those corners and it's an essential design element for various elements like buttons, inventory & skill slots, etc... one bird to kill 2 stones. Yeah and thanks to that little guy the UI can now be scaled up to 8k monitor resolutions without becoming blurry/pixelated.

Last element, looks a bit ugly as it presented here, but it is used for coloring your character and customizing them with materials you unlock as the game goes.

There is also a bunch of programming work being done, we're working on interactions, abilities and movement systems, it's all extremely important to have it done for the next build as well, but more about that soon!

Thank you for reading and thank you for your continuous support of all of this <3
Love you all, and I hope you had a fun Halloween!