Game 2 Preview - Dawn + The Soulspire

Happy Saturday all! We've seen Dawn in a prior development log, and the most recent one had the Soulspire previews. Since then, I've finished the lighting in the tower, acquired and rigged Dawn's clothes (pretty) well, and started putting together the first renders that are actually game-ready. I don't think I'll actually use any of these because there isn't a story behind them, but the actual process for CGs will be the same.

Making these renders led me to make even more fixes and upgrades, which was an expected part of the process; it's the first time I'm doing this, after all. These are all raw images straight from Blender, so the only post-processing done was the built-in denoiser at the end of the render. I'm especially happy with the lighting; I didn't use any spotlights or funky lighting tricks because the scene lighting just works so well as is.

Now that I've got a good idea of how to do this stuff, I'm pivoting more towards the technical side of things, specifically towards finalizing game mechanics. I'm 99% sure I know what I want them to be, but I'm gonna put them down in code and finalize them over the upcoming week. That'll finally allow me to start working on some of the game art; I can't really make art for a game until I know what I need for that game. For example, once I finalize what the exact areas will be, I can start making renders of those areas. There will still be a good number of full-screen renders (like PoP) for important scenes and interactions, but simple/repeating scenes, navigation, etc. will be done with a background + sprite setup, so I need those BGs.

As always, I post regular updates in Discord, so if you want more updates and previews, please check there! Thanks for reading!