prisma prisma prisma

Production has been a little slow this week because I've been trying to get Bala stickers ready for printing, as well as business cards for Bala and myself before an event in May that I will need these things for.  Those have finally been taken care of and sent off to the printers, so now I have to wait for those beautiful things to come flying back to me.  You can check out the baby updates on Bala on the main Bala blog, over here.

This week, we've been meeting regularly with our professor to get as much feedback on Prisma as possible. We really want to win this thing!!  The first thing I addressed was the skyboxes.  Originally the skybox had a brush of the moon that looked like a photograph, and not enough stars.  Here's the new skybox:

I manipulated photos of the moon (or some kind of object in space, I'm not actually sure) by overlaying them with different colors using a watercolor brush for blending.  I also tried to make the color palette of the skybox more cohesive with the objects in the environment.  So far, it looks much better with the new skyboxes alone!  The above image is a screenshot of the neutral dimension, and below is a shot of the blue dimension:

Not shown in these screenshots are twinkling stars we have added.  They look great and really invoke the feeling of a shining night sky!

Additionally within these shots, I have redone the textures of the cliff pieces we use in these levels.  Here is a before and after of the texture:

This texture was originally done by someone else who didn't quite have the time to finish it.  I reworked it by manipulating other cliff textures we had that were finished and making the rocks match up with those.  As previously mentioned, you can see these textures at work in the screenshots above.

The last major thing I did this week is make a boring cave somewhat interesting.  I've already received feedback and need to alter the texture to be less clean and more primitive, but here is the new cave texture:

The cave paintings change as the player switches between dimensions.  In the top, the people are being grabbed by hands, while in the bottom, I guess they're dancing.  Based on feedback, I need to get rid of the dancing feeling.  It needs to be more mysterious, like aliens and UFOs, but not aliens and UFOs.  I don't know if I have time to completely change the painting, but we will see.  

That's all this week!  Next week, work on Prisma should be coming to a halt as we resubmit our project to be voted on.  Maybe next time there will be a video of gameplay.  Until then!  Bye