The left side of the picture has the specular enabled, and the right side is just diffuse lighting, for comparison. The effect has been rather exaggerated so you can really see it - we won't really have ground that looks like lumpy dog poo :)
We have a palette of 255 colours we can use in the Voxoid engine's scenery (the gidrahs will use their own palette distinct from the scenery). Each colour can also point to a bump map (applied in world space, on all faces) and will have its own glossiness and specular intensity values. We'll be using glossy surfaces pretty sparingly in the game though as the effect can look rather garish, as you can see. We'll limit it to water, polished internal floors in bases, maybe snow, maybe the metal surfaces of robots, etc.
More Stuff For Patreons
Patreon processing has just gone through. Everyone who has so far lifetime donated $10 or more to our cause so far can now mosey on down to http://www.puppygames.net/steam and get themselves a Steam key for Titan Attacks in addition to Droid Assault and Basingstoke! If you haven't yet got your Droid Assault key, hurry up, because it's still in the secret Christmas mode for another few days!
New Years Resolution
I have resolved to make 100 posts to Patreon this year - twice weekly. This is more onerous than you think :) We will continue to do a weekly update alternating between Basingstoke and Battledroid (and later, our other secret projects), and I'm going to try and slip in a post on Wednesdays or midweeks in general and do a few series of interesting little tidbits.
Some of the things I will be talking about will be a short history of Puppygames and how we came to be making the games that we did, some treatises on game design, and some technical articles about the Voxoid engine from Super Attack Programmer Dan. Interesting stuff, just for you supporters.
I would also like to set up a Discord server to talk to Patroids on except for one small problem, which is that I'm at work all day and they won't appreciate me spending all day chatting to people instead of working. If only we were making loads more money from the Patreon... hmm. Another newsletter incoming!