February ‘26

Happy New Year!

...is how I meant to begin this post over a month ago. But I felt like getting a little bit more done before writing up another post, so here we are!

Let's do some show-and-tell. This guy sits down and turns on the television, and we can see footage on the screen which is actually streaming live from elsewhere in the building. He can turn the screen on and off as well as change the channel.

And whatever plays on the television in that room, also plays on...

The projector in this room! I'm quite happy with the way the visuals of this scene have come together. In previous posts I've mentioned the fact that barely any lights in this game cast real-time shadows on objects—most of the 'shadows' you see are manually mapped on a UV layer by yours truly, or just a dark ambient light pretending to be a shadow. It's a stylistic choice, but also has to do with performance and optimization, since I'm currently sitting at about 200 lights right now. I'll enable shadows on particular lights in rare cases like this when I think it'll make a big difference visually, but otherwise I adhere strictly to my no-dynamic-shadows rule.

I also spent some time investigating wobbly props. What exactly does that mean? Well, as a result of some checks I have in place to keep all the NPCs synchronized with each other across multiple animations—which can get tough when you introduce time travel as a mechanic—prop animations will sometimes become desynced during playback from the NPCs that triggered them. The discrepancy in time is usually only one or two frames, but since these are props, which are often being held or worn by the characters, even a difference as small as that is immediately noticeable. Take a look at the hat on this character's head after it became just slightly out-of-step with him.

The solution was to take that logic which checks and syncs all the NPCs with one another—the same logic which was causing this problem with the props—and extend it to also check an individual prop to the NPC that's controlling it during playback.

I’ve also finally been making some solid progress on music for the game. It’s been a real struggle trying to figure out a good style for the music, but I think I’m finally landing on something I can work with. I know this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned music in one of these updates without sharing anything, but just bear with me oooonneee more time. I promise I’ll have some clips WITH SOUND for you to enjoy in the next update.

…whenever that is. Until then, thanks for reading!

-Tim