01022021

Heavy snowfall all day: the deepest it’s been in a real long while. Supposedly it’s gonna continue coming down tomorrow, maybe even into the next day. I hope it continues for a while, although it probably won’t. I like it when it snows. It’s one of the few times when I feel alone, yet at peace. There’s this strange kind of thrumming melancholic hum that settles in over everything, blankets out all the other usual anxieties and palpitations, leaving only a sense of coldness: detachment without alienation. The utter absence of sensation, good or bad. It’s like a sadness devoid of pain.

Anyways, I finished up the camera FX for the sinkhole and spent the rest of the day touching up the rain. I started by revisiting the audio, which turned out to be much quieter than I remember. I went back to some recordings I made over the summer and layered into the original second, denser rain track. I think it sounds a lot better now: there’s a greater sense of impact upon vegetation especially, which was pretty lacking before in retrospect.

I also re-implemented the splash decals on the ground surface, and significantly increased the amount to “realistic” quantities, depending on the number of droplets currently active in the room. As part of this process, I revisited all of the existing cells and mapped out no-rain-splash regions in all of the relevant ones. I had to turn down the effect pretty substantially for certain rooms – currently, the outpost and the generic forest areas are most impacted – so hopefully I can figure out a more elegant solution than just spawning in hundreds of objects every step. Either way though, even if I can’t find a better solution, it probably won’t matter that much: it looks okay as is.

Lastly, I added a new VFX overlay for rain, which features a pseudo-dynamic lens effect that simulates water droplets accumulating on the screen. It ended up looking a lot better than I expected. I’m currently

investigating the possibility of implementing some kind of basic system that reduces visibility over time when it’s raining, forcing the player to manually direct Avery to wipe away rain in her eyes every few moments. I think that would significantly deter players from spending too much time out in the rain directly (on top of the existing dirtiness accumulation), but I have to figure out how to implement in a way that makes sense visually first. Hopefully I can get that in by tomorrow…