The Cocoon

My vision of the Cocoon Cryopod System for Strings. Well, I say "my vision", but given that I'm the entirety of this project, we can probably safely assume that it's final. It's inspired by a butterfly cocoon, which just begs to be made into some Geiger/Lovecraft-esque Technohorror.

I managed the computer text screens by literally opening up a terminal, running `hollywood` or `htop`, and sampling the window with OBS. I then used a combination of FFMPEG, and Kdenlive because I'd just woken up and was too lazy for the command line, to threshold it; which could then be piped into Blender as a video texture. The glow came from a bevel node on the shader for a thin 3D mesh; which was added (clamped) to the video texture and used as the factor on a mix node. One shader was emissive, the other was fully transparent—and voila.

I'm not entirely content with Ada Walz; she lands on her face a little too quickly, then seems to recover in a split second. However, this took all day to render over here! So, I may put it down for a bit and fix that later. There's a good chance I'm being hypercritical of myself anyway.

I've decided that Chase is canonically going to fall on his hip, and will begin the game with a cane. It should make for an interesting experiment with gameplay. I still remember the first mission of The New Colossus, with Blaskovich rolling around in a wheelchair on the sub, while under fire—it actually was a lot of fun. Then, later on, you're full-body capable again, but you already have a good idea how to fight in the game. It was an excellent example of negative reinforcement! I think I can do the same.

Honestly I wish I had more time for this stuff.