"Different aspects of the game were 'saying' different things, so I wrote a 'Mood pitch' document"

So this week started out a bit ... difficult.  I was talking to Chris, who had been thinking about what we need to do to build a trailer to officially announce the game.  He was concerned that the overall feeling of the visual and audio experience wasn't really pulling together - different aspects of the game were 'saying' different things.  So I sat down and wrote a 'Mood pitch' document - something that all those of us working on the game can use to get on the same page about the audiovisual mood/emotion/feeling of the game.

And it looks like it's worked!  There's still a way to go to gather everything together, but between installing a new graphical postprocessing effect (an Ambient Occlusion effect from here), animating various pieces of the UI as they update, adding new building models and getting in some new sound work, its really all looking much better.  I'll do a proper look at it next week, once some final (and important) tweaks are in place, but so far we've gone from this:

Village scene without Ambient Occlusion effect

to this:

Village scene with Ambient Occlusion effect

which is already quite the improvement!

That's not all though!  On top of that:

  • we've got a draft script for the announcement video  
  • contacted someone to help build said video  
  • partly assembled the channels etc for a Discord server (I'll invite you all when it's ready, of course)  
  • started the epic journey of registering with Steam as a game developer.

It's been quite the week!  And now I'm going to go somewhere that doesn't have screens glaring at me and close my eyes for a bit.  See you all next week!