Graphics Ramblings

So I need to make the graphics a lot better in this game. This is one reason why I think some people aren't so interested in playing the game in its current state unfortunately. At the same time, I don't really blame many people for that.

As of today, 10/5/21, the game doesn't even have some sort of lighting system! The game simply renders the grid mesh and the boat mesh / the background texture(s) and what not. Relatively simple render pipe in terms of the things that are submitted to the renderer which is great considering how much fun the game is to me personally already.  So I think I hit somewhere in the "fun" area on this game without having to only sell the game on its graphics.

Anyways, i'm sorta rambling on for sweet post length but I did want to make some sort of discussion out of this post. One thing I have heard before is that the graphics really do play a large role in the game's design as making some important visual pieces of the world more arbitrarily obscured can actually ruin gameplay! Luckily in this game, in the current state, you can easily see the important gameplay pieces IE the boat and the waves really easy. This is something I want to keep without changing the notion that the highest waves are red and the lower ones are just a slightly different tint of the flat water color. The boat needs to retain some sort of texture or some sort of color scheme that tells you that it is the boat.

The first step I am planning out is to just add the missing lighting system and see how much that adds as all I need to do is simulate some notion of photons jumping around in the world, picking up color and losing energy as they bounce all around the scene. I am leaving this quite ambiguous on purpose as the actual techique(s) I will end up using might vary so yea. This is mostly due to the fact that I haven't wrote a very serious light sim before.

After that, I just want to measure how good the game looks via my own bias and I hope that ya'll will pitch in too and tell me what looks good or doesn't look good.

After that, I think i'll end up considering some better art. Luckily, there isn't much seriously required art content as I have currently made a game that doesn't require a ton of artist generated content. This is both good in terms of reducing the actual size of the game long term and also reducing the full cost of the game since I won't have to contract as many artists.

Anyways, at this point i'm rambling on but I hope that you got something out of reading this! Please have an awesome day today!!!
PS let me know your opinions on my game if you have some time to try it out!