Pages of the Book: Behind the Scenes
Summary
Inkarn8 shares a dev update explaining a technical change that makes player choices trigger visible page turns. The announcement details how textures are copied and frozen so environment changes appear as still pages, improving immersion. Includes a short clip showing the effect during class selection and why it matters for the reading experience.
🛠️ Pages of the Book - Behind the Scenes
Hey ! I'm Reivyn, a programmer and misc dev for Inkarn8.
I'll be kicking off the second dev update, with a little bit of a technical talk!
We've done a lot of work on the book, with pages that contain environments, UI and input support but today I want to talk about the environment on events and how we can really reinforce the choices you make while traversing the book.
Before these changes, the pages of the book really only turned when you moved to a new environment, even though you were making choices...
I felt like that when you make a choice the pages should turn and reflect the choice that you made, so this is what I set out to do. Before, we had quick and nasty toggles whenever you made a choice and the page didn't even flip so things just appeared on the page unceremoniously.
The pages have a few textures on them, one for the page's paper, one for the environment and one for the UI.
Whenever the player makes a choice, the page environment changes so the picture on the page does too.
In order to solve this, give the the current texture to the next page, then I freeze the current page by copying the texture to it, since the texture is now just a still image changing the environment won't change it anymore, and so I actually make changes in the environment at this stage and turn to the next page.
With this simple change, we now have our choices being page turns, making our game feel just a bit more immersive.
Here's a little clip of this in action during the class select:
