Speebot: Water update
Right off the bat - I've (pretty much) decided on the name of the 3d platformer game I'm working on.
The name Speebot is a portmanteau of the words "speed" and "bot", and is so far my favorite name out of all that have been suggested. This is now also the name of the main character of the game.
Last week I've been working mainly on one big feature of the game - water. Instead of falling into a boring abyss, the player can now dive into a big blue ocean (and drown in it).
The engine required a handful of improvements before this could be implemented. The renderer now supports reflections, distortions and distance clipping. This resulted in a quite pretty reflective water surface:
You can find all the development videos in this playlist.
This effect comes at a slight performance hit, which should not really be a problem - the game still runs at a stable 250 FPS for me (slight dips when I turn on the screen recorder), but I added an option to switch reflections on and off in the graphics menu, just in case.
There is another new setting, which lets the player control the particle count in the game. This option was added after implementing the water splash effect, which uses approximately 150 particles at a time. This also was never a problem for me, but the option is there to significantly reduce the particle count in all effects, in the case that some computers can't handle it well.
That is all for now. There is still a lot of work ahead, but so far I'm happy with how the game is turning out. The next things on the agenda are new props, tiles and gameplay elements.