Hey, guys. How's it going? Today I have finished up the greyboxing for the mine level and let me tell ya, it's another monstrosity of a level. Here's how it looks now:

This is the view from the entrance of the level (south is towards the bottom of the SS)

This view is from the left side of the level

This view is from the right side of the level

This view is from the east wing

This view is from the west wing (I'll explain what's with the enormous looping shaft later)

This view is from the level exit (north is towards the bottom of the SS)

This view is from the bottom of the exit area

As I've continued to work on it, I realized that I might have gone a bit overboard on the whole twisting-turning layout of the level. I made a conscious decision to simplify the exit area as much as possible, so instead of going intricate, I went bigger shaft size. So the shafts at the exit area are double in size compared to the entrance of the level. The exit area will feature 2-3 blockades (I don't know if I used the word correctly) where the straightforward path is blocked (obviously!) so the player must resort to using the side shafts.

It goes without saying that the whole vibe to this particular level is "disorientation". I mean just look at it, how could you not be disoriented? :D So far, it felt like "good" disorientation (if such a thing ever exists) but I'm very reserved about this feeling. A very accurate representation would be made by the people who will playtest it.

OK, so in the screenshot with the west wing, you might have noticed a ridiculously long shaft that starts from the bottom and ends at the top. Well, that would be the shaft to the elevator that will send the player near the octogonal shape room (which is near the beginning of the level and "coincidentally" is also where the west wing part of the level begins. This was made to avoid making the player backtrack the entire way up. Instead, the player will have a feeling of progression and he/she will be sent near the beginning of the level without the need to backtrack. I just remembered that the east wing does not have this feature, so I'll update it as soon as possible.

Speaking of updates, I promised you guys an update on the cloud material and the monkey bar mechanic.

Cloud Material: Scouring Youtube for tutorials for me to learn about Arrays and whatnot, I came across a tutorial that taught Cloud materials. It looked super-awesome in the thumbnail and said to myself "I've gotta do this". And so I did. Luckily, it was an easy tutorial that yielded great results. See for yourself:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QMcL9tG2WRS8iSe143TX4frd0l37rVtD/view?usp=shari...

Pretty cool, right? There's one tiny little problem, though. It's a little bit on the expensive side. The base shader has about 150 instructions, but other parts of the shader (2 other parts, if I remember correctly) have almost the same amount of instructions. Having a big number of clouds like this might get super expensive on the GPU, so there's room for optimization to reduce the amount of instructions. Otherwise, it's damn cool and has a lot of detail due to the post-process that is in the project.

Monkey Bar: This one was sort of made on a whim some time ago. I figured "If I can make the player character jump slightly up as well as jump forward a lot, I could replicate the Monkey Bar thing from Doom Eternal and the branch jump from the recent Tomb Raider series". And so I did. Check it out:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b1OqHMsPtkkOBUff-gubaGdFu8RZLRs3/view?usp=shari...

It's slightly exaggerated but it feels OK. I exaggerated the intensity of the jump because it felt too much like the jump pad (which is what the monkey bar script is based off of, like an extra connection from the character movement, but to the X axis AND the Z axis....seriously, that simple). What it does great is that it contributes greatly to player momentum. And since it's rather small in size, it can fit in all kinds of tight places.

So, that's it for today, guys. See ya in the next post. Bye!