Audience with the King (Revamp Water Test)

So some of you awhile back expressed interest in seeing some of my practice stuff that never appears in game. The topic came up on the Discord again a few days ago so I thought I'd share this.

(This image will make more sense if you've played the entire original game and takes some inspiration from shots in Scarface or the A Clockwork Orange intro)

Over the past few weeks/months, I've been increasingly trying to work with water. While I'm not going to keep redoing the game and repeating Revamps over and over, one constant that's bothered me in the Revamp is the pool water in particular. Originally, when I was just starting the Revamp, I spent a little time with it and just never got it right.

It's bugged me ever since.

My concern was that the pool was very opaque and I wanted to see the distortion of the body under the water.

So recently I've been playing with a hot tub since it's a smaller, controlled space for water testing. I just dropped a character in there like good ole fan favorite Mom-Fucker and just screwed around with the water itself. I've come back to this about a dozen times and finally made a breakthrough today.

I'm pretty happy where things are now but this is what we may be looking at in the future. Water would be transparent but distorted from the ripples. This new texture also allows me to drop the camera below the water and film shooting up to see distorted characters outside the water, a complex shot that I attempted early in the Revamp but it was never quite right.

Obviously, if I go with this route, I'd have to fully re-render the entire pool folder (several hundred images) for consistency but that would likely only take a couple of days to upgrade the entire game.

Just some thoughts.

I told you I'm still working on stuff :)

Let me know what ya think