Sometimes you get this big ideas in your head about this amazing system that's going to be awesome and set your game apart. Prior to this project I did effects work, and I got pretty good at it and I would spend weeks at a time working on specific effects that were going to be super awesome. So it's been a little painful that I don't generally have time to push these effects as far as I once was able to when effects was my only task and I was going to indulge and do some really high end effects stuff just once to punch things up in seacrit by creating underwater waterfalls. They were going to flow down and trickle into a cool puddle with a weird transclucent quality that was going to show space and the cosmos when you looked into the puddle. When you sam htrough them, you would split the stream, and it would fork in this really cool way using procudural masking that I was going to sinc by translating the players position to a 2d mask within the shader. 

Well I got the base waterfall done, and I while I COULD keep chasing this original vision, it dawned on me that now that I have deformable terrain I can literally just paint a hole below the waterfalls, drop a point light in it to bring it all together and call it done. And since there is so much more to do, for now i'm just going to go with the quick and easy solution and not worry about creating a blend at the bottom of the waterfall so it mixes with the puddle perfectly, and deal with multiple shaders and sorting issues and all that crap and just get this waterfall in and working. I may jazz it up with rainbow effects and bubbles and other stuff, but I'm pretty happy with them for now and I don't want to get too sidetracked with art when there is so much gameplay that needs doing.

It's a big difference between working on a portfolio piece where the total focus is the look and a game where there is something to be said for simplicity. This is about 60% as cool as what I was going for, but it's about 10x easier so today I say, "Fuck it, good enough".

"Some other day" I will polish effects and environments (fat chance of that ever happening). Looking at this screenshot it just dawned on me i can adjust the light from pure blue to having a hint of white and it will break up the flat blue a touch