Story Mode Update Part 12 (Patreon)

Final release for the game is September 20th! It will be Supporter exclusive for a few weeks and then a global release will ensue.

Today I'll be talking about a cool effect I developed for the game. It's a noisy blurry render effect and it is used by yet another new entity. Image below shows the effect applied to the player (purely demonstration purposes):

This effect is used to give the appearance of a shadow and to make it hard to discern what the object is, it works very well in dark places and can be exposed using flashlights. The setup is very simple.

First setup the target object to only display white:

Then render it to an offscreen buffer to save it as a mask:

Apply some gaussian blur to give it soft edges:

And finally layer it on top of the regular camera texture but with some added moving noise. The noise gives it a weird but spoopy feel:

Since this is a screen based effect, objects that move far away will have a stronger effect from the blurring and thus will blur out of existence from a distance.

Unfortunately depth culling cannot be done because that would require my rendered mask's depth to be blurred and that would produce bad results.

Regardless the new entity that uses this effect will likely be one of the last enemy entities that you face before you reach the exit.

Stay tuned!