This week I started work on a proper tutorial. While all the graphics are placeholder, the level is fully playable and partially implemented. This following week I plan on filling in with real graphics and implementing the rest of the level. Although somewhere I got sidetracked and started on the tutorial level instead of the settings menu, —that’s just as well, since settings aren’t going to be super important in the early playtesting releases that are coming up. I’ve also worked on some props and graphics relevant to the memento system in the game. There’s a new full-screen blur effect that happens at key moments.

The “baked” reflections I talked about last time have also made some great progress: I now have a fully working cubemap generator, and all the frameworks necessary for handling cubemaps on a per-room basis. Although actually baking and applying these maps won’t happen until later on in development, it’s nice to see Forgotten handling such overall nice looking graphics with a remarkably low load on modern computers. I guess you can chalk Forgotten’s performance up to a nice combination of me using a low-end PC and almost everything in Forgotten’s universe being static, which wasn’t the original plan.

When I first started development on Forgotten, which has been on-and-off over about two years now, I wanted everything to be interactive. Turn the sink on and off. Turn the TV on and off. Open this, look into that. While in concept, this was a good plan, I quickly realized that it would take a lot more time to fully animate all the models like that, and then that the performance hit would be HUGE. Not because it’s actually expensive to do that stuff, but because of all the optimization choices available when you don’t do it. Lights that are calculated once (by my machine) and then never again, for instance, are much, MUCH faster AND better looking than lights calculated every frame by your machine. The same is true for physics calculations, which are much simpler when you’re dealing with static objects.

I do often wonder about the kind of gameplay improvement a fully interactive level would provide. Would it be better? I’d like to think it would make the world more immersive feeling, more reactive. I remember playing Half-Life 2 for the first time and feeling more than ever like I was a very real part of that game’s universe just because I could move things, and people looked at and reacted to me. Even today, that feeling is hardly matched by the superior graphics of newer games. Maybe if Forgotten does well, I could consider trying that in the next game that I make. Or ten years later when Forgotten gets a “4K Edition”. ;)

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