Straight!? Revamp v13 Before/After : Teasers 1

Yoooo,

Hey all. So it's been pretty ....um... eventful(?!) lately in the game development so I wanted to check in with some of the usual Before/After teasers for update 13 which will feature the second half of Chapter 6. Today we'll be looking at 4 sets of teasers which mostly will feature a discussion on environmental changes for a lot of these sets.

As always, if you're interested in the video segment of this discussion, you can find it here. It's a long one and is much more a Director's Cut version of this post with a lot more detail and backstory (as well as like 56 minutes of unedited me).

But anyway, let's jump in and take a look at the pics:

Pic 1: This shot is from the original and we've talked a lot about this before but it's a good place to start to show the differences here and set the tone for a very night time update. This was the old version of Zack and Braden walking at night. We still had the overused dark tree background that never moved. It's also super dark in the back with really bright light upfront-- which doesn't make a lot of sense.

Pic 2: Hopefully this pic will sorta pick-up from the last update night scenes and help you visualize carrying them over to the night walk with both characters. Obviously, the lighting is completely different here and everything looks better. We have moonlight bathing both of them as well as the depth of field that we've talked about before. This also has a different feel to it. In the last update we saw a depressing scene with Zack sulking at night. Hopefully, the idea here with both characters is to use that same darkness but help set the stage for a much more intimate night where these guys are trying patch up some of the mistakes and dishonesty. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on these night time shots because they're pretty self explanatory. I basically just wanted to give you a glimpse that the night time quality from the last update is going to carry over through the entirety of v13.

Pic 3: Alright, let's jump into the new stuff. This shot is from their continued walk to the bar (While recording the video segment I realized that this entire teaser set is just people walking and I couldn't help but make fun of it-- totally not intended but it was pretty funny). I've referred to these as the "street" shots which in the original just consisted of a camera pointing at two buildings which sorta represented the "street" on the way to the bar. Originally, I expected to just reuse these shots and not spend a lot of time on them but then when i pulled them up I realized that I made some major mistakes. Every once in awhile we get to stumble across a shot where my colorblind ass fucked up and this entire set is a good example. So I thought those buildings in the background had texture to them-- turns out there's no texture at all so they're just literally blank objects in the back. Long story short, in the process of retexturing these buildings, I ended up rebuilding the entire street almost from scratch so let's jump to the replacement shot.

Pic 4: Here's just a sample of the street from the Revamp. We're going to see a lot of new stuff. First off, there's a transition from the park using the same tunnel. I thought this helped pull the world together and make each of these environments less like a fish bowl. In the Revamp, we'll see an expanded version of the street including the buildings from the previous version but this time we'll have some cars going by as well as pedestrians out walking and stuff. Just general world-building things to help make things looks more realistic and populated. I may do a video to show you the set i have for this, too. It's one of the more ridiculous sets I've built. The use of bloom here helps highlight the car and street lights and helps make things look just a bit foggy. In other shots i got a bit more artistic with light sources and stuff but we'll save that for the actual gameplay. Basically the street is more alive now and they'll spend a lot more shots walking to the bar including past the park wall and other buildings.

Pic 5: Alright, these last two sets of shots deal with one of the most popular environments in the game: the park. This original shot shows a sprawling landscape, which back then looked pretty good for where I was and also for what kind of hardware I had. When we got to this scene in the game the first time, I actually had to buy an entirely new computer because my old one couldn't handle it. There's a lot going on here: trees, leaves, shadows, bushes-- all that stuff is pretty intense for renders. However, the biggest problem with the park here is that while the sky is dark, the rest of the scene is very bland. There's no shadows. there's no mystery here or anything that really pulls me and makes it feel intimate.

This started a quest several months ago to try and redo this park and upgrade things, giving a lot more mood to the lighting and stuff. The short version of this story is that while I loved how things initially turned out, it turned into a giant mess with my computer and graphics card with entire system crashes that spanned all last week as well as shot renders that were taking 12 hours per picture. For those of you that played the original, that means that animation in this environment was going to take over 300 days to render, lol. Fuuuuuuuuck that. Last week was frustrating because i really wanted this park to look good. i had high expectations for it and not being able to do that with soooo many bugs resulted in me getting pretty upset. So Jordyn helped me problem solve last Saturday for about 7 hours and we finally got things stable. If you're interested in the much longer version of this story, you can check out the video log. Essentially, it was a rough week.

Buuuut, I've recovered. Things are working again so let's jump to the Revamp Park teaser.

Pic 6: Here's a taste of the park in the Revamp. We're going to see moonlight peeking through the trees which will help act like a natural spotlight. The bloom in the scene makes everything much more mysterious and intimate and the contrast between light and dark just hits way better than the original. There's depth here now and it goes in every direction. We'll be spending some time in the park in the later part of v13 so we'll get to see a lot more but for now let's take one more look at the original park then we'll jump back here again.

Pic 7: This shot (of people walking again) is the discussion these guys are having as they walk through the park the first time. Note: today's discussion on the park is only going to be the first pass through it-- not the post-bar talk park. This shot of Zack and Braden talking has the same flat look of the park as well as just really generic facial expressions and stuff.

Pic 8: The Revamped park walk is going to be more interactive. This shot shows Zack giving Braden the fake ID from the last update and Braden giving his typical reaction to things like that. We see a lot more organic poses here as well as the ID actually existing in the Revamp versus the narrative just telling you it was given to Braden. Minor stuff but hopefully it'll help make things more immersive. Obviously, behind them the park shadows are a lot more detailed that before (the blur is depth of field) and we have that mix of blue moonlight along with the street lights above them sorta churning together to give us more contrasting light and dark.

We'll be seeing more of the park again later in the next teasers. Right now i'm hard at work on the bar scenes so stay tuned for those. If you were a fan of the bar the first time, the new version is fucking incredible. So yeah, hope you enjoy this first look as well as some of the changes. Despite the problems this past week I still have around 100 pics done for v13 so it's coming along and it looks really good so far.

Stay tuned. Big and pretty things coming