Estate of the Damned - First Person Survival Horror

Bimbam

Finally reached the point where I nodded to myself and thought 'Yeh it looks like a game now', so thought I'd share my latest far from finished project (still needs a proper name even):

Loosely maintaining a devlog on itch where you can see how fugly it used to look: https://bimbam360.itch.io/loftly-project/devlog

Still loads of visual oddities, such as Godray light bleeding at certain angles, seemingly due to the camera FOV (which I don't want to change). Also, the textures in the many places are completely off to what they look like in Blender which is annoying, but I will fiddle with them down the line anyway as 'needs more surface imperfections/grungey decals'. But if your wondering why the ground outside is so bright, this is why lol.

Speaking of outside, while you can't see it in this video, there IS a forest that leads off to a cliff. This is handled by a LOD system I pulled from my previous game (which is on hold) so while inside the house you will only see the outlines/shadows caused by imposter meshes. Get closer and the quality ramps up.

Similarly to keep the frame rate stable(ish), I use a more ugly approach manually defining area nodes to dictate when a room is visible or not.

FrameRates on a RTX2060 are around ~70-90 depending on the room, which is frankly not great considering the relative lack of complexity, but from what I've experienced so far, kinda expected this. Looking forward to Godot 4 and some of that juicy Vulkan goodness!

A fairly large chunk of performance can be gained by simply turning off Godrays and shadows. Godrays and world shadows I'd rather keep, but shadows from the torch are barely visible atm as weirdness occurs when you offset it for some reason, so these can go I imagine. I did try creating an array of decreasing intensity omnilights along the length of the torchlight using a raycast to define the spacing/end to give more interesting dynamic-esque shadows, which worked to a degree but looked buggy more often than not. I still think it conceptually could work, but would require an array of raycasts across the crosssection of the torchlight to identify the closest item that has received light, at which point performance is gonna start being impacted pretty badly I think. Also there will be further optimisations down the track bundling textures, chunking stuff more and so on, so not too concerned just yet.

Anywho enough for now. I've got paying work again atm so far less time to spend on this than I would have liked -.-

Thanks and comments/performance suggestions welcome!

Bimbam

Also to whoever made the Godot splash logo I found on the Godot Git repo (which I assume makes it MIT?), I hope you don't mind I taxed it . It's awesome!

asetyowatir

that's so cool!

Megalomaniak

Do note that the godot logo is trademarked and protected.

Bimbam

I guess I'll remove it then to be safe. Updated link to a newer version that doesn't include it.

TwistedTwigleg

The license for the Godot logo can be found here: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/master/LOGO_LICENSE.md. It looks like its licensed under CC-BY 3.0, so it should be usable with attribution (if I understand correctly, I am not lawyer though!)

Megalomaniak

Right that's the image file as data, but the logo as in what is depicted in that file is trademarked as well.

somewhat relevant links: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-website/issues/44 https://github.com/godotengine/godot-website/pull/153

Bimbam

Shadows, Doors & Interactions

Shadows still need work and tweaking bg volume compared to SFX.

I did try using physics doors, but my days are hinges confusing. I got it working to a degree, but there was an intermittent delay in player impulse affecting the rigid body I couldn't figure out, and decided it was more hassle than it was worth to implement 'draggable' doors so the player could close it behind them. Also, real-life doors tend not to turn in both directions, so just kinda looked weird in testing.

Suspect ideal world would be to use a hinge door with an ~85 degree limit, and trigger optional door opening/closing with the motor. Might revisit later but for now, meh.

Bimbam

Cliche though it may be, no indie horror game is complete without a forest thick with fog. Here's a snippet of me trying to get particle fog to look ominous.

I've also settled on a hopefully not already taken name, that is relevant to the eventual story. It was a toss-up between 'In Praedium Perdition' and 'Estate of the damned' (which I think should be analogous for each other). I felt the Latin-ish version sounded overly pompous, so while a bit corny, went with the latter.

Any tips on taking the 'edge' off particle fog which gives that obvious flat-plane look at certain angles would be welcomed ^{^.}

jbskaggs

Nice!

Bimbam

Playing with Fire

Been tinkering with trying to get a semi-realistic fire going using AnimatedSprite3D planes (that use a looping fire sim animation I made in Blender) combined with a few particles for the Lounge.

I'll probably redo the fire sim and double the length, as at the moment the loop is a bit too obvious. That and obvious lighting oddities aside, I am mostly happy with this for an afternoon's tinkering. It doesn't look all that great once you get close though. Lighting, Shadows & GI Probes in general continue to prove to be the bane of my life. They're sorcery when they work well, but it's mostly a trial and error crapshoot for me to get them to look good :( For example, the weird flickering going on with the table in the bottom right. I do fluctuate light intensity a little with a script, but this more obvious flickering seems to be GI Probe related and I have no idea why :(

Oh and I wasn't paying that much attention when I recorded so the sound from the nearby window mostly drowning out the fire >.<

Bimbam

Playing with Light

Spent a bit more time tidying up some lighting oddities and finally beginning to nail a few aspects of it (not many, but floorboard reflecting lights make me happy). Saying that, literally just noticed the moonlight is reflecting off the floor when there's no line of sight! ARGH!

I am happier with the fire in the lounge, but it still kinda looks off, and glass still does this weird glowing thing at certain angles.

Just going to stick with Reflection Probes and careful positioning of multiple light sources (with/without shadows) as this seems to be significantly more performant and less of a headache to try and get looking how I want it than GI Probes was turning out to be.