Hey, thanks for playing!

This was made using Godot 4. Initially was using beta 7, but had to switch to beta 6 because the birds were not following the flight path properly on export.

I have a directional light (the sun) that's slightly lacking in blue color, and I also have ambient light in the world environment that's blueish. That's what makes the shadows look blue. This is kind of how it would look in real life with a clear sky like I have.

I also have SSAO with a big radius in the environment, this helps to add more detail to the rocks. I had SSIL enabled but it didn't make a big difference in the image, so I disabled it for performance reasons. There's also Glow, I'm using additive blend mode for it with intensity, strength and bloom increased from the default. Then there's Fog, I've set aerial perspective to 1 which makes the fog color come from the skybox. Sun scatter is set to 1 and sky affect is set to 0.

Finally I have ACES tonemap with default values, this helps to give more contrast to the whole image, making it less flat-looking.

Also I'm using the Procedural Sky for the skybox.

Yes I had to to some LOD for the trees because the game is GPU-bottlenecked. I'm not sure if Godot 4 has a built-in way to do LODs, but I did it manually. Once you get far enough away from a tree, it switches to a version which has less leaves. It also switches the material of the leaves, the high LOD version uses alpha scissoring, whereas the low LOD version uses alpha blending. This is because alpha scissoring essentially makes the leaves disappear at long distances.

It still takes a lot of GPU resources, the GPU time taken is about 8ms on my GTX 1050 which I think is still too high, but I didn't want to spend a bunch of time optimizing, especially with the limited jam time.

I mostly use Godot 3, but tried 4 for this jam because I thought it had a heightmap feature (that wasn't really the case other than the heightmap collider, but I was too lazy to switch back, since it already converted my project).

The import process is a bit better, for instance with gltf you can have it automatically generate a collision mesh on import, rather than having to do it manually like in Godot 3, there's other niceties too with the new import system. Signals are a bit better with 4 because now functions are first class citizens, meaning that when you connect signals through code, you use the function name instead of a string. This means your code is less fragile, since if you change anything to do with the signal, the script editor will give a warning about it. I'm not sure about the 3D graphics differences between 3 and 4.

Other than that, I don't think there's a big reason to fully switch to 4 yet, especially since it's still a bit buggy, I've had it crash a few times too.

Thanks for playing! The time in the screenshot is 30s faster than what you're saying though :)