What Did We Learn Today

Another week, another build, and for this week perhaps another lesson. A question was put to me today, backed by the feedback since we launched the game demo. Should we pull the demo off the site?  Personally I think it's a great demonstration of game play and what anyone can do with Reloaded in a very short amount of time, but it seems the wider world are looking at it as a direct comparison to any other FPS game out there. Certainly for the modern FPS games such a comparison is not complimentary for us, and may even damage future pledges. I am interested to hear what you guys think, keep it up there as a demonstration of where we are now or pull it and only return it when it 'looks' better and has more 'game' in it. Opinions welcome.

Is it something as simple as adjusting the gamma, brightness and contrast, improving the render and assets themselves or is it more about improving the game play?

The current game demo for Reloaded

For a quick preview, I used my favorite art package to play with the colour balancing of the current opening scene, producing this:

Increased gamma correction by 1.6, brightness up 33 and contract up 55

I recall a few requests for a 'brighter, crisper' visual, so is this something we should be spending a little time on?  I am also looking into the modern methods of lightmapping games these days, whether it's radiosity mapping or something more advanced.  Might spend a few hours over the weekend experimenting with some lighting effects to see if we can get the visuals up a notch without re-doing the entire asset set.

On today's news, the build is almost ready, just doing the last few hours of testing now. Hopefully the alpha testers will approve :)