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The Night's Willow is a game currently in production by Kenney, thanks to funding from Creative Europe we've received the possibility of creating a point and click adventure game. TNW is going to be a 1^st person point 'n click adventure game. The player navigates around an open environment to collect items, solve puzzles and talk with various characters in the world. The story is linear, but will contain sub-storylines and optional quests. The player has to solve puzzles and progress in the story by switching between dimensions, one light and the other dark.

Technical

Locations in the game are photographed using a 360° photo camera ( Panono). Using various effects like dynamic weather, waving vegetation and advanced lighting the environments will be brought to life. The player can look around, similar to Google Street View. By clicking on points of interest (e.g. a door, walkway, alley) or using a map the user can navigate between various locations.

Over the course of development we'll be keeping you guys up-to-date with progress, we kindly ask to actively give criticism on our publications and help development of this project :)

In The Night's Willow environments are made using still images, it's really important to add animated objects to the scene to make the environment feel alive. This is why we've spend extra time creating our own foliage system.

To create trees we take reference photographs of actual trees around the office and in nearby forests. We take full reference shots and scan branches and leaves (using a portable white backdrop). These images are then processed and the background is removed to create sprites which can be used in the game engine.

These images are then processed and the background is removed to create sprites which can be used in the game engine.

Within the game engine the sprites are positioned and rotated to generate a tree. Branches and leaf groups are put in nodes to connect them. Our foliage code makes the branches, leaves and trunk react to forces in the game (like wind and rain). The game automatically positions the branches and leaves in 3D space.

Together with a little particle emitter the end result is this;

https://gfycat.com/ifr/BetterGroundedKoalabear