Devlog: Dark room and Darker room

Mar 16

The final section of Vocifer Cave is a completely dark room, where the player must be guided through platforms by a flying ally. My plan was to give this ally a bright border so she's visible in the darkness, while she screams signals at the player.

However, to test the puzzle before modeling her, I thought of using a placeholder sphere and translating the sound signals to colors. But if I do that... why not keeping that in the final version? If I have to light up the ally's contour, I might as well use different colors to help players with hearing difficulties, while keeping the sound signals for color-blind players.

I programmed the shader for brightly colored contours over a year now, I parameterized it specifically so I could do something like this.

Mar 21

I completely redesigned the screwmlins, a hostile species from my lore that will appear in level 7 of CowHammer. This choice exploded into pages of lore that even affect the present-day stories of my comic, as I'll show when I can draw Lazarus's backstory. This is what they look like now:

Screwmlin

They are a species of parasitic Chaos worshipers who evolved to look innocent and lure their prey. This however introduced an unexpected issue: level 7 was designed considering that the screwmlins are a burrowing species, while the kobolds aren't. I could have just inverted that, but it's more fun if I adjust the lore:

The kobolds of my lore are a dragon subspecies. I'll save their mythos for the in-game lore, but they worship flying dragons and build their homes as high above ground as they can to feel closer to them.

The screwmlins instead used to be able to fly, but Chaos distorted their bodies so badly that they lost this skill. They thus believe that flight must be an execrable abomination, since their god gave them the gift of... not being able to do it.

Mar 22

 The dark room of the cave is working better than I expected. The ambient is as spooky as I hoped.

 Dark room of Vocifer Cave

The darker room is also functional: the ally placeholder changes colors to guide the player towards the next navigation node at different speeds - some sections are tricky, some require long jumps in the dark.

  Darker room of Vocifer Cave

I will of course have to add a bit more pizzazz to it, a plain black room won't do it, but it's very important that the ground isn't visible at all, so the ally's help is necessary.

I also have to improve the pathfinding algorithm, it's currently very janky and the camera controls aren't accurate enough. I've been working on my own spline approximation, but I'll need to do some tests. Either way, good progress.