SS Games

Weekly update #8: Level -1 "The Infinite Graveyard" part 1

Added 2024-04-30 03:13:06 +0000 UTC

The work for the new level has officially started this week

- This is the current state of the level and how It looks

Level -1 is an infinite level which resembles an Infinite Graveyard. This place is extremely foggy and you can find gravestones everywhere. It contains a lot of vegetation when randomly wandering around and not following a path, which makes it extremely easy to get lost in...

This week's work was mostly to put in place assets for this new Level, finding the right ambience and some other things I will mention below.

-Another picture with Level -1

A big issue I encountered while building this level was performance. Whatever I would do or change, the fog would cause a huge fps loss and a ton of input delay. In order to combat this, I have created a new Level system which depending on the current level you are in, there will be custom commands settings applied. This happens after the custom player settings are applied, which is an amazing way of optimization. For example in certain levels where light matters less, you can force the shadows quality to a lower value without any significant visual changes, but massive improvements in performance. Currently there are custom commands in place only for this new level, but I plan to give a small remake to each of the previous level with all of the things I learned while working on newer things, but this will be before the full release as a "final optimization".

This level will probably not be 100% finished before the next update planned to release on 1st of May but playtesters will be able to explore this level even if it's not 100% done.