-- Incoming Transmission --

Greetings Cosmonauts,

Dyraxi here (I've been told I don't have to say the whole thing) - I was very happy to see you guys checking out our first Devlog so as we work to get the first scene ready I figured I'd talk a little about the challenges we are facing

The Locked Room from the demo was very simple and didn't reall offer much of challenge, but as we move to tell a real story we want setpieces that reflect the variety and complexity of the Kalypso

As mentioned before we are committed to supporting Ultrawide resolutions, these aspect ratios offer challenges that 16:9, 16:10 and even the venerable 4:3 don't, so I would like to take some time to discuss how we plan to tackle these challenges

The first hurdle to cross is deciding how your game wants to fit inside the unique viewport of an ultrawide display: as you can probably imagine it boils down to two choices

For this first scene we opted for a vertical fit, as we'd rather communicate the vast scale of space and fit our communications tower in the frame

We have designed the scene to have natural borders on the side in the form of shadows from foreground items, which helps make the letterboxing feel more organic

On the subject of letterboxing, one quirk of our setup is that while our black skybox blends perfectly with the shadowy boundaries of the scene our sprites are still very much rendered outside the intended frame

To fix this embarrassing snafu we could have gone several ways, but we opted to writing a custom script that places two black overlays on top of the action, stretching from the edges of the camera to the side of our boundary, basically creating two dynamically sized pitch black curtains by the sides of our cosmic stage

We investigated vertical scrolling as well, which would have allowed us to fit the space background while also filling an ultrawide viewport, but for this scene we felt it was more important to take the whole scene as a glance.
Since this first area will also serve as an introduction for new player fitting as much as we possibly can was our priority, other scenes may opt for bilateral scrolling to make the scene feel more expansive

Also I hope you enjoyed a little sneak peek at the first real environment of the game! I can't talk about the puzzle that takes place here, but I hope you will enjoy figuring it out as much as we enjoyed putting it together

Going forward we will be doing less scene reveals this way, but I heard our concept artist is rearing to give you guys a little taste of the locales you will explore in Episode 1, so stay tuned!

-- End of Transmission --