Dev Log: Emission and Bloom

Sometimes I wonder myself, what takes so long to develop a game? Within a few hours of starting your project, you can have a character in a world, running around an island, swinging a sword. It shouldn't take that much longer to round it out and ship it. Right?

Let me tell you something... it's about the details. It's about the immersion. It's about the complete package. Some of the many things that go into that are emission and bloom. While it is easy to go overboard with these, without them things are pretty bland.

Take a look at these examples. In this first image, there is no bloom, and no emission.

Neat model, right? I thought so. Let's add in some bloom, and overall post-processing effects.

Okay, we gained a little bit of ambiance. Something is still missing. I tried adjusting a few settings in the shaders, but it still didn't pop the way I wanted. Finally I decided to pull open the base texture, and make my own emissive map.

Now we're talking. Look at that crystal glow! But, in the above screenshot, bloom had been turned off again, since my test scene has the camera effects typically turned off. So while it certainly had a vibrant blue hue, it still had just a little bit missing.

And, there it is. Bloom and emission. Isn't it beautiful?

As some folks on reddit have said about other examples like this, "That is so pretty, now you need to make an entire game around it!"

Sometimes elements like this are motivational, as they look awesome. It all just takes time.

I hope that the little things like this help take a good game and make it great. While my main focus is making the primary game play fun, it also should look nice, and provide a complete experience. Things like this really bring out the ambiance, but also make the game take time.

-Sarynth