Monday 30 April 2012

Working with lut's and gameplay


If you want to make a good game, you better do a good gameplay, but if you want to make an excellent game, you need to offer cohesion between the gameplay, the visuals and the narrative.
In PrIL (Project Interactive Landscape) this is going to be achieved by offering a visual representation of the dynamic macro-changes of the scenario. For example, if you need to activate the rain to make something grow instantly and then been able to climb to that cliff, you will get an instant rainy day, but if you also need the night so you can travel fast, you will get the combo night+rain, and we want to make sure that every state is really symbolic and unique (cohesion between gameplay & visuals).

LUT’s helps a lot in this process; doing a color correction directly in photoshop and the take it back to UDK is… amazing. Unreal matinee is also a good tool to achieve this “modular climatic design”. In the case of the fog, we want full fog when the “fog event” is on, but we want also more fog than usual when the rain is on. How do you achieve that? Unreal Matinee.

When the fog event is on, I animate the fog density parameter; from 0.05 to 2.5. For the fog of the rain, instead of animating the fog density parameter, I increase the Z location of the exponential fog density. In that way, the same effect is acquired but using two variables, so you don’t need to worry about hard transitions or problems between 3 values of fog density. Keeping stuff in a binary form always helps to put some order.



















No comments:

Post a Comment