Week One

We’re Graphical Blues, and we consist of Jason Lo and Harvey Yu. We hadn’t thought of a project name yet to be honest, so for the time being you can call our project Graphical Blues as well.

Our project is going to be a small first-person exploration game. You’ll start in a desert surrounded by sand and cacti in all directions. You’ll find an archway right in front of you, one that will take you to another world! It’s difficult to explain at this point, we’ll talk more about it later in the post.

We’re going for mostly tricky points:

• We want shadow mapping. If you’re in a desert, you’d expect a giant blue sky and a giant white sun casting light down on everything below. Not having shadows would be weird.
• We want to try displacement mapping. That stone archway could really use a nice cracked-stone pattern, and displacement mapping could be a really cool way to do it.
• We might try SSAO. All those crackles in the archway could use some self-shadowing to look their best.
• It’s first-person movement, so we’ll be having simple bounding boxes so that you can’t just walk through cacti and such.
• We may integrate water somehow (oasis?).
• The world beyond the archway is going to need some bloom, trust me.

The archway serves as a one-way portal to another world (we’re thinking grassy knoll, Windows XP style) that you will be able to walk through. This will be really cool if we can pull it off, so that’s going to be our main creative push.

We both don’t have much in the way of graphics experience besides this class, but I’ve talked about this with other, much more experienced people and they’ve given us ideas on how we’d construct this, so we definitely think it’ll be doable. Wish us luck!