Hey all,
So I'm into Chapter 8 (actually working on the tail end of scene 3 right now) and got far enough in that I can start feeding you some stuff so today we're going to look at the first 3 images for Chapter 8.
In contrast to previous teasers, I'm not doing a Before/After bit this time since we've scene these environments before. However, I took the Before/After a step further than usual in a longer video form here that takes a look in comparing the original to the early Revamp images and then to the later Revamp images. It's pretty crazy how the game has continued to improve and if you're really into the Behind-Scenes-Stuff, you can check out that 1 hour walkthrough in the higher tier. I got pretty nostalgic in looking back and that stuff and can honestly say that I never expected the quality of the Revamp to be any better than it was in the first release so it's bananas to see where things are today.
Ok, enough of that, let's jump in.
Image 1: Chapter 8 will continue with the ongoing themes we've seen in the Revamp by taking a little extra care with all the minor scenes to keep them fresh. I took a risk on this in the Revamp but it seems that people are really getting into this the way I intended and honestly these are my favorite things to do. I got a ton of notes about the last update being one of the best just because of the extra positioning and freshening up environments we've seen a billion times. This shot from v17 is just an example of that transition from the dorm room to outside and just dropping a couple extra images in to show more human aspects of these guys. It's also pretty crazy if you go back and compare the early Revamp "outside" shots to the quality of this one.
Image 2: This second shot is another example of using alternate placement in familiar locations to keep things fresh. We're used to seeing Zack and Mikhail talk on the edge of the pool and this scene calls for something different (which honestly just feels better at this point in the story). But the problem with putting them out in the water is that they need to be wet. You may have noticed more wet skin in the last update shower scenes. That's something I've been working on in the background knowing that this scene was coming up but I had to make them from scratch and tbh they're really hard to make when you're fucking color blind so it's been a progression for me. Now if we get picky about v16, there's still some issues with the wet skins there but I'm still learning. v17 makes another jump in progress on that and i made a breakthrough in fixing some of the glaring issues we saw in v16 (mainly the black lines and skin tearing on Zack). This was also an opportunity to make wet skin for Mikhail, who has darker skin which requires the creation process to be completely different (darker skin requires more light to look wet than lighter skin). Good learning opportunity and some decent progress there that I'm happy with until I get more picky down the line (I also plan to go back and do some fixes to shots in v16 showers now that I figured more out so if that was bugging you, it'll be fixed soon. v16 was just a transition for me).
Image 3: Ok... I gotta be honest: this last shot is fucking pretty and I'm really proud of this one so insert some type of Aaryn squealing sound in your head here. I have a variant of this where Zack isn't flipping Mikhail off and I couldn't make up my mind which one I'll use. But I think this is the one that will appear in game and I may take the variant and flex it on social media just because I'm really excited about it and just really wanted to share it with someone. Underwater scenes have been a goal of mine since the Revamp was created. Some of you may remember the early Revamp underwater swimming scenes during tryouts and how big of an upgrade they were from the original game shots. Well, I still wasn't happy with those but for whatever reason I got motivated and took another crack at it and this was the outcome. I'll be honest a second time, despite loving this shot and being really proud of my progress, I hate that I just upped things to this standard because this is soooo much more work to create but damn it looks better. Hopefully, through some more experience, I can still maintain this level of quality but also speed up because these shots are fucking exhausting.
Ok, that's it for today. The bulk of the shots I'm working on are in familiar environments and I'll save those for the actual update but our next Teaser images will be back to the Before/After setup just because we'll be looking at 2 completely new environments and if you played the original, I think you're going to be surprised at all the extra stuff I've dropped into those so stay tuned.