Style Updates

I've been tinkering with ideas about what Phosphene should look like for close to a year -- more or less from the beginning of jotting down ideas about the game.

I'm a solo developer, so one goal for me is always to try and choose approaches that give me lots of utility for not too much overhead; because of this, I always wanted to have modular, relatively blocky, chunks that could be smashed together quickly. I also knew from the beginning that I wanted to not only take advantage of but really lean into how nice the lighting in Unreal Engine could look.

I went in circles around exactly how complicated to make those modular pieces and what to do in terms of textures and materials for what has felt like forever though.

With this most recent attempt I feel like I am finally dialing in to a look I really like. I found an approach to assembling materials that I think works well for mostly squared-off shapes but brings in some nice details from high-quality textures and still lets lighting effects really shine.

The images in this post also have the new screen-space global illumination that was added to Unreal Engine in 4.24 enabled and are layering some custom post-processing on top of that.