After a long vacation abroad during the past month or so, it is a must that this game will meet it’s goal of completion in march.  I’ve pushed through to level 19 today with great progress.  The new newspaper-esque art style looks really good and at this point, it’s just a race to the finish line.  The coolest thing about experimentation sometimes is how you stumble on to a specific kind of rendering style by accident.  I’ve found that by using the same SSAO technique that I have previously implemented while removing the depth-checking produces a dark outline halo around most models in the scene.  While for generalized SSAO this would be undesirable, I love the way it looks and have decided to make it part of the art style for the dark/noire second-half section of the game.  Combining that effect with a lack of the blur post-processing effect on the noisy SSAO results in the very newspaper/comicbook style that I was already going for.  

Needless to say, things are going well now that I’m back at it.