Sprint 1
In the spirit of agile development, I will be developing short passes, and getting features or requirements in place. (In a later article, I plan to talk about why sprints are not needed in agile, and why I won't likely won't use them.) I want to start very visually, and space is a great place for that. I'm working on samples of how the ship will fly through space. The game is low poly, and I'm considering the possibility of a low poly space background, which lead me to this concept:
This is the first attempt. Please don't think the game art will look anything like this. I'm experimenting, and plan to do several more and compare directions. The code to complete this was actually really simple. I have one script that rotates a sphere based on its position. I.e. it literally just applies the position to the Euler rotation. Then, that follows the camera, stretching from just behind the camera to way past the ship we are following. Then, as the ship moves, space appears to move, but it is basically a sky box, placed on a sphere produced from a cube (to guaranty all square faces, and not a mix of squares and triangles.)
What I'm not liking about this, is that it really looks like I'm rendering it from the inside of a cube, unless of course you realize the single reflective light is split in all the wrong directions. I'm not sold on this concept, but I wanted to try it. I thought the effect was pretty, but not applicable for this specific game. Below is literally the only code I used to produce this example.
So the square sphere stretch concept might make more sense if you look at the outside of the sphere and the inside with this gif below:
So this gives me a way to look like its a square/low poly, while also giving more spherical reflections. Naturally, I inverted the mesh, so the faces are inside the sphere. I also did one other effect, where there were two spheres, one inside and slightly smaller, that moved a little faster, to give a parallax effect. It also sets up the reflection on the internal sphere, while the outside sphere had more clarity to it.
This is the first attempt. Please don't think the game art will look anything like this. I'm experimenting, and plan to do several more and compare directions. The code to complete this was actually really simple. I have one script that rotates a sphere based on its position. I.e. it literally just applies the position to the Euler rotation. Then, that follows the camera, stretching from just behind the camera to way past the ship we are following. Then, as the ship moves, space appears to move, but it is basically a sky box, placed on a sphere produced from a cube (to guaranty all square faces, and not a mix of squares and triangles.)
What I'm not liking about this, is that it really looks like I'm rendering it from the inside of a cube, unless of course you realize the single reflective light is split in all the wrong directions. I'm not sold on this concept, but I wanted to try it. I thought the effect was pretty, but not applicable for this specific game. Below is literally the only code I used to produce this example.
So the square sphere stretch concept might make more sense if you look at the outside of the sphere and the inside with this gif below:
So this gives me a way to look like its a square/low poly, while also giving more spherical reflections. Naturally, I inverted the mesh, so the faces are inside the sphere. I also did one other effect, where there were two spheres, one inside and slightly smaller, that moved a little faster, to give a parallax effect. It also sets up the reflection on the internal sphere, while the outside sphere had more clarity to it.
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