Dreamspaces

I decided I wanted to see an interactive diorama, and from there I played a bit with the aesthetics of a snowglobe, and also with the cross-section look on the terrain, which I had rarely seen.

At some point, I went from a box cross-section, to a cylindrical cross-section, to a sphere cross-section. A sphere cross-section turned out to be quite challenging, and I ended up doing my first proper shader to achieve the ability to show a natural cut on the terrain as you move, as well as for the large rocks (independently of them being on the terrain or in the air).

After starting out attempting a lot of performance hungry mesh altering solutions, I finally came up with a solution to have the cross-section / volume cut rendering all inside a pixel shader, no need for geometry alteration.

On this project I’m mainly focusing on aesthetics, as it was a thing missing from almost everything else I’ve done, and there are some parts of the game stack relating to it that I want to get more knowledgeable at (shaders). I also want to change from the usual paradigm of chill walking games, which focus on big extenses of terrain to be explored and look at, and instead focus on the small here-and-now moments, and include options so the player has ways to chill on his own small sphere of content.