I was on an email exchange with Tom from @tharlevfx on youtube and he helped me to clarify how to construct a world space based gradients so that the WFC tile sets will have a unified look regardless of its height in each of the object modules.
I then went off on a little bit of a tangent looking for fonts for some of the UI elements. Tried out a couple of different styles from cute chubby to elegant stylised. I was wondering what kinda of name would be representative of this experience and for now I think I will call it artist steal (inspired by good artist copy, great artist steal)
I was going to do some character modelling for the art gallary guards but instead I went down this rabbit hole where it suddenly crossed my mind that the reason why dynamic shadows was not popping up in my playmode is because of the orthographic view in my camera setting.
this is an ancient bug probably 5 years plus where no dynamic shadow is created because of the orthographic setting. if I change it to perspectives they would appear.
So i had to follow some advice on how to fake orthographic view with perspective
set the camera FOV to 10
meaning you would need to extend the camera boom to a very far distance
also came to realisation that I should not be manually rotating the followcamera object if i want to see the character at an angle. instead I should be rotating the camera boom to get the top view
adjusted the contact shadow bias to lower so that it brings the shadow close to the character’s feet
To continue my procrastination I wanted to added some vfx for my character when she runs around. I followed this tutorial and made some of my own style adjustments. It works really well with the skeleton and all i have to do is to add a notifier event. I also learnt a few more settings to create burst vfx.which i am going to apply for the pickup vfx for the prized object.
I think next steps I will have to make some guard characters. I am still deciding if I want the game mechanics to be based on puzzles and timing or chasing.
I will probably get a better understanding when I build out the patrol system for the guards. or not? I stumbled into this interesting article about computational geometry called “art gallery problem”
I want the success state to have an alien newspaper topline saying how a painting has been stolen. maybe with a shocked pompous art gallery owner right next to it.