The Dream (Part 3)

The process of creating the majority of the Tribute, is simple and complex at the same time. It reuses the island content that is needed for the main game, but it is an alternative version. Version before Twinsen lands in the prison, this is not the only version that I planned. From the beginning, I wanted the look of the islands to reflect the game progress.

Citadela Island will start as a peaceful place where the majority of people do not like what Fun Froc does, but in some ways, they accept his rules and try to continue with their everyday life.  Then Twinsen lands in the prison, and the island enter early military state, there will be some troops dispatched to secure the city, and build some fortifications.  Kidnapping Zoe will mark a military state, which we all know from the first game. This will add some progress to the game and, at the same time, ease the difficulty for less experienced players. You may also noticed that the switch between early and normal military state feels super short. This space will not only be occupied by a prison escape but also include aditional dream sequence.

Then I planned something that would not fit into the Tribute scope,  the rebellion phase. These changes would start later in the game with your effort to support the rebellion. Normal citizens would start to rebel against the Fun Froc regime. You know, at the beginning, some innocent stuff. Some FunFroc posters that are torn off the wall, and a small graffiti somewhere in the dark passage. Over time, these signs would become bolder, and you would find paint dumped at the Fun Froc statue and big graffiti in the city center. The idea was that you could travel across different islands and see how your actions affect the world. 

This also opens the door to some additional quests, like taking over the radio and TV antenna and broadcasting rebel programs. Or distributing the rebellion fliers to different cities, possibilities are endless, and all of that would give players the feeling that their actions matter.

Still, even with this content, I love the idea of layering stuff on top of the existing geometry, doing changes to it in a way that are consistent over time. If we add to it different color grading based on the state where we are and change the lighting conditions, we can achieve a lot. If you do not know what color grading is, do not worry, I will save you some searching: 

So the idea is there, execution is a little bit complicated. I could brute force it and make it work, or I could build technology that will support all of these requirements. And you know me, I choose building the technology, and spoiler alert, it is not ready.

Well, we will need to wait a little bit more for the results of our work.