Evolution of the Graphics in A Case of the Mondays

From the start we wanted to create a great looking and game. Since we have three programmers on our team, I was able to focus on the rendering and graphics programming while the other programmers focused on the game play. By splitting the work this way, we were able to achieve the best of both worlds.

I wanted to make the game look as good as possible and in order to do that, I had to use modern OpenGL 3.0 functionality. This included VBOs, VAOs, shaders and use of our own matrix stack.

Here is a screenshot of the game as it appeared back in December 2012.

Here he have basic per-vertex shader being performed by depreated OpenGL lighting functions.

We then implemented basic shaders to perform per fragment lighting. In the image below we have two per fragment spot lights which light our scene.

As soon as first semester needed  it became apparent to us that we could make a pretty game at our experience level.

Here are some screenshots of the final build of the game.

We are using deferred shading to allow us to have dozens of lights on screen, we have written our own blending shader, shadow mapping and we apply a bright pass filter to make the lit ares of the game look brighter.

The images below compare shadow mapping vs no shadow mapping.

Shadow mapping disabled

Shadow mapping enabled

 Shadow mapping provides a subtle but welcome addition to the scene.

The difference between the first semester screenshots and the second semester screenshots really make me proud to say that I worked on this game. Graphically it looks like a pretty decent game, in my opinion.