Making a bigger world to explore

Author: Salireths

This month I've dedicated to the multiverse of Khzandithri: creating the overworld map, and making other platforms visible in the background for player to see as they'd soar through the skies on their ship - something I drew on concept art before. Though I didn't quite get to making the actual ship yet, that will be the next month.

I also found some time to think about the mechanics of travelling. While its only on paper still, I'd like to pursue certain features: overworld exploration, visiting marked locations on it, and experiencing random events while you're flying your ship.

Travelling

There are games with confined levels that have pretty (but non-interactive) skyboxes, and others are grand open worlds where almost every mountain you see - you can climb.

In our game's setting and lore, there are those vast chunks of land floating around on the horizon (as shown on concept art earlier), and it would be a shame to keep them only as pretty backgrounds and nothing more, however, it would be beyond any sane developer's capability to make them all fully-explorable (unless you're No Mans Sky or Star Citizen, but they have more than two people on the team, so yeah).

So what do we choose to do?

I believe there is a great compromise how to do distant platforms: it's not a skybox, not an explorable level, but an overworld map instead! Think about it, we have a ship to fly around, and when you reach a certain marked location on that map, you can disembark and enter the gameplay level.

This is a mockup of how I imagine overworld navigation could look like, but its a big subject of change.

And as you fly on the overworld, you can get interesting small random events, like intercept a distress call, getting lost in an unstable nebula, find debris to salvage. There is so much ideas to experiment with, and the best part they are all tiny events that don't require a lot of work to pull off, yet they can provide a lot of varied content.

In general I'd like players to spend more time in the ship, make the journey fun by itself, and then, the feeling of disembarking in a new place, meeting new NPC species will be oh so more impactful. Not to mention it's more moddable this way, as new locations can be just added in.

While we haven't implemented the traveling gameplay just yet, I feel this is the direction to go forward for the build. Also this approach is not without technical and artistic challenges, but thankfully most of them we have addressed this month.

Cloud shaders

Concept art you've probably seen already.

I believe good clouds are essential to realize my vision of this otherworldly scenery, as illustrated on the concept art from before. And while some recent games have made some great cloudscapes, like the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, this technology isn't just readily available to everyone, and not to mention, it is extremely GPU-hungry.

There is a technique that is used in smoke VFX, where a volume of gas is pre-rendered multiple times, each time with light hitting it from different direction.

Then, in-engine, we take a flat plane, and depending on where the sun is, shader simply chooses which picture to display to match it, creating an illusion of a volumetric gas, without actually doing any expensive ray-marching.

With some modifications we made something very similar for our clouds and other gases. It's not finished yet and still looks a bit off, but it's just the matter of tweaking it more - it needs better particle simulations and renders. But I think it looks decent already, suits our art-style.

Astral scape

Aside from clouds we also did a glowing shader, its an old-school trick of putting a camera-facing sprite with a lens flare on it, however if you change the shape of that sprite you can create a lot of various effects.

You might be wondering, what are these rings and streaks leading into what looks like a star? In a nutshell, Khzandithri is in a different plane of existence, with its own universe and laws of physics. I keep evolving the idea of how it looks, but This post, while a tad outdated, might provide more details.

To fill the void beyond the clouds, fog layers, and other glowing elements, needed to provide something interesting to look at. Since I decided there will be no stars here (the major lore pillar of this universe is that it is so old that stars are gone, and species must colonize other planes of existence), I instead rendered and then painted a 360 panorama of a nebula-like astral phenomenon. 

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed the scenery that is serves both needs, as a pretty background and a map to navigate around. The post is a bit short because there is a second part coming right up in a couple days - in that one we'll take a look at what Hopfel has been brewing in his system programming kitchen!