A few days ago I showed you the latest update of POPGOES Evergreen's kitchen, which we had to change due to some legal issues regarding props that were bought from the internet.
It seems like, for the most part, you all seemed to enjoy how the kitchen looked. We saw praise for its realism, its moody atmosphere, and its sheer detail. However, it was impossible to ignore a very basic and prevalent complaint: It's quite hard to make anything out.
At first I disagreed with this argument. I thought it was fairly clear where the floor, the cabinets, and the 3D printer was. And, really, these rooms are just backgrounds for gameplay that focuses much more on the animatronic threats that enter them, rather than the environments themselves.
But my opinion on this quickly swayed after realising another serious issue: the entire concept of using skylights in Evergreen (windows on the ceiling to let natural light into the building) was broken. For those of you who just want to see what the alternative is, scroll down. But if you are interested to learn WHY this change is so much better, read on.
Skylights in Evergreen have one major benefit: they look nice. It is undeniable that the ambience that is achieved through the flooding of calming blue moonlight is genuinely quite nice to look at. Though it can be argued that it isn't very fitting for a horror game. But here are the downsides:
Every room looks quite similar when the colour and style of the lighting is identical.
It's super difficult to make the lighting bright enough to see the room's contents, but dark enough to realistically be coming from the moon. I've seen a lot of people convinced that the skylight looks too bright to be moonlight, but if we make it any darker it'll be too hard to see stuff!
Each room has a unique shape and size, which means the angle, brightness and colour of the lighting is difficult to get right in development. Usually leads to a lot of confusing post-processing effects to make the rooms feel consistent. It takes quite a while to organise, basically.
We are planning on adding a subtle "night cycle" to the game, in which the colour of the lighting, and the sky in the right view window, changes based on your progress of the current night.
This is not too complicated of a concept until you realise that EVERY SINGLE CAMERA has a window in the ceiling. We would need to figure out a way for every room to be affected when this happens, and that's not even considering how the angle of the light would need to change throughout the night if we were to make this realistic (basically impossible in a Clickteam game).
The final and most obvious issue is what I stated earlier - the soft lighting and the shadows from the window frame makes it hard to make parts of the room out.
I've been settled on the removal of the skylights for a while, and there were two obvious alternatives to light up the rooms...
The first being "emergency lights" that existed in the light bulbs of each room. These would be dim, possibly colour-coded sources of light in the centre of each environment. Simple, and very easy to implement.
But the second...
The second alternative is to add flashlights to each camera.
Sources of light that come from the viewer's perspective, a common trope in horror games and movies, such as night-vision IR cameras, or holding a flashlight in a free-roam survival. And it's popular for a reason - It is creepy.
The reason it's creepy, I think, is because it makes the viewer feel vulnerable and claustrophobic. It gives the sense of "If something were to appear in front of me, it would know EXACTLY where I am because I'm shining a bright light". I think that's it anyway. It also tends to cast very large, overwhelming shadows...
This is the new idea we're going with for POPGOES Evergreen.
And this concept may be familiar to you, because it's already something in the FNAF series - Five Nights at Freddy's 2 in particular. In FNAF2 you can toggle a light when viewing cameras to get a closer look at what's inside each room, at the cost of limited power. In POPGOES Evergreen, there is no power limit. The lights of each room will always be turned on, but they will FLICKER when an animatronic moves into or out of the room. This is our alternative for the overwhelming static that is usually used in FNAF games to change a camera's scene (because really, how would that make sense in 2024?). I think we might also make a room's light completely turn off when it is shut down by the player.
Oh and of course Fritz would add lights to the cameras... HE was the night guard in FNAF2!
Anyway, we've spent the past few days on this new concept. We are EXTREMELY happy with how this looks, and see it as an obvious, objective improvement. It is clearer, more colourful, more creepy, and it has literally helped us with a gameplay mechanic... unintentionally!
Here is how it looks (with a special guest):
And in HD (with a comparison to the skylight):
Now I think some of you may see the nice, atmospheric blue lighting of the skylight render and immediately think it's better. And sure, some of you might prefer that and that's fine. But I implore that you consider the reasons we're changing this, and remember that this is meant to be a horror game.
We're trying to make Evergreen scarier than the original, more visually impressive than the original, and easier to understand than the original. Because of that... I think the new version is a definite upgrade.
And we hope you like it!
We're working very hard on the game, but it is STILL (yes, still) very early in development. Like, 15% finished. That percentage will speed up as things are created (as some parts will be reused, etc) but I am NOT going to give any predicted release dates, so stop asking...
That's it for today. We will be updating POPGOES Arcade eventually to reflect these changes, since the arcade room won't have skylights anymore which makes the current build of POPGOES Arcade inaccurate lmao.
Thanks for reading, and I'll answer questions in the comments here!
- Kane and the Evergreen team
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