Update June 2023

This month I kept working on refining the final visual look of many levels. 

I started with a level later in the game, which contains a mechanic that lends itself well to having pretty levels because it doesn't constrain the shape of the level too much.

I made some good progress, but soon realized that it was even better to focus on the Red Tower level ( I posted the concepts here a while ago : https://www.patreon.com/posts/secret-miegakure-64090891 ) because it contains many of the coolest elements within the same level: cool buildings from concept art, NPCs and dialog, 4D grass, and 4D shapes scattered about. So I finished it, and it looks great.

After that, I thought that I would move on to a level with more traditional gameplay. The red tower level gameplay is both very simple (just explore and talk to people), and very complicated (there is a secret goal for expert players), so it's not the best representation of the regular gameplay. 

I was thinking, what is a level that is as impressive as possible visually, and has a good representation of the gameplay? One answer was obviously this later level containing a 4D creature!

So I worked on that level and it looks great now! It was strange to go from the "greybox" version of the level that has been in the game for so long to a real looking level, because sometimes I get attached to parts of the old look. As I said before, it is difficult in this game to balance making something both pretty and understandable. The level is relatively big. and that adds to this problem. But I have a lot of experience thinking about that now, so it actually went pretty fast, which is a good sign.

After that, my friend suggested trying to get to a state where I could show off how much content is in the game, because he always thought it was impressive how much stuff there is. So I tried to as quickly as possible go through levels that were pretty advanced already, but not quite done, and improve them. 

It was nice to take graphics tech that I made in anticipation of being able to use it in levels and finally use it! Some levels that had great potential visually but where still using my old rendering methods are now finally looking amazing.

The nice thing about all of this is that every time I get something that works well, such as a nice style for 4D grass or 4D rocks, I can re-use it in many levels. So it partly goes faster and faster over time.

I will keep working on levels next month!

Thank you so much for your support!