So I had to make a tough choice recently.  The game originally planned to have 36 levels in sets of 12.  Each 12 would feature a specific art style, decreasing in realism with each set.  A major snag related to my own lack of art skills alongside an increasingly pushed back completion date for this game has lead me to make a change to this plan.

Toonshaded games are not as graphically “simple” as they appear to be.  I quickly realized this while attempting to adapt one of my environments for this look.  A perfect example would be to look at any recent celshaded game such as Zelda Windwaker HD.  You will notice that all the textures are hand painted with a very high attention to detail an artistic quality.  This is an artistic talent that I simply do not possess, and it would be a mistake to pretend that I do.

So what I’m going to do instead is break up the game into two halves of 15 levels each, and bring the total level count down to 30.  This will allow me to do just one alternate art style (an easier to render dark noire style) for the final half of the game.  Combining the dark black and white effect with the recently implemented SSAO effect that I’ve added to the game should look really cool for these last 15 levels.

The only remaining problem with this new plan is that I only had 12 levels done sofar and I would really hate to re-hash the same 3 environments again to fill the last 3 before changing art styles.  This lead me to the decision to make yet another new 3D environment for the game which I’ll use to create 3 more levels.  I initially really didn’t want to do this because I am approaching a burnout risk for the game, meaning I’m starting to get tired of working on it.. which puts the entire project at risk.  So, I decided that It’ll be a simpler level so that I can keep the total game size low (both in disk space and complexity).  I’ve posted a screenshot of what I’ve got sofar for that level.

More on all this soon…