I’ve been doing some more fine tuning to the visuals of the game. Replaced the wall texture and tweaked the lighting again. I’ve started playing with the material node editor to fine tune the materials/textures in the game.
I’ve been really busy with this game today! Firstly with the graphical tweaks showed above. I then spent a while creating new and more challenging chambers. I’ve also introduced the new rectangle rotating platform that you can see a few times in the image below, which is even more challenging than the circular platforms. I’ve made a real effort to make sure there is a smooth challenge slope from the start of the game. So, although the maps get more and more challenging, I’ve tried to make it so it never suddenly becomes a LOT more difficult.
The stages are starting to get pretty challenging now. It’s that awkward stage where it is difficult to test them 
The final chamber you can see below, you must correctly time three jumps in a row. Firstly jumping up on to the first rotating platform, then carefully jump from that to the next rotating platform and then finally using the red jump pad to jump off of the rotating platform up to the high exit. 
Attachments
Wow really cool! Will all the levels be in one scene, so no loading times? And do you already have a culling system?
Thank you! 
At the moment, it’s in one scene. Although as you can probably imagine, it is starting to lag when loading from the main menu. It runs fine though once in the game. Unfortunately, I’ve struggled in the past with creating a load screen for when swapping to a large scene. I might have to do some head scratching there.
I havnt implemented a culling system properly yet, but I have done some simple tests with some basic planes. I’ve left all of the modular pieces separate, so the culling is working very effectively. I can cut out huge amounts of the scene all of the time.
I’m really happy with the progress so far. I’m glad I’ve been so picky with the visuals/lighting/graphics and changed it a million times to get it close to where it looks really good
I just need to keep this momentum going and get it finished and on the market place
Cool cool! As final touch in the end you could bake the ao for the level to bake it look even better!
Well it has been on my mind, baking shadows/AO, but I think it would be a huge pain in the arse trying to do at this stage, even if I used the Atlas tool.
I’ve added the SSAO shader though which is giving a very very subtle AO.
Off-topic but relevant:
I’ve started learning Unreal engine 4 as it’s now free. That has single click button that automatically bakes all the lighting and shadows etc and applies with a single button. I wish Blender had that!! You don’t have to worry about using atlas’, applying maps blah blah blah. Just one click, wait a few minutes and POOF! Done!
Thanks for that Nines. I’ll be sure to check it out 
Last night I sorted all the different stages in to separate atlas groups. The problem is, all of the modular pieces are instanced (I’ve used Alt-D to copy) so it doesn’t unwrap properly. Just, all the different modular pieces end up sharing the same UV coordinates as each other. If I want to do any baking, I will need to change this so they are all there own meshes. If you know what I mean.
Is there a quick way to do that? To make them all single use objects. Bearing in mind there are around 1000 objects in the scene, so I will need to figure out an en-mass way.
Could I expect a considerable performance drop if instead of all the objects being instanced, they are all normal copies? What other downfalls could there be?
EDIT: Figured that bit out. Select all objects -> U -> Objects & Data
So at this point I have relevant atlas groups. They are all single user objects, which means I can give them all individual UV’s for baking.
I’m doing all this in a copy of my blend file in case I screw up anything
Sooo I think at this point I can make a another file copy, which I will switch to cycles. At the top of my head, I don’t need to worry about any of the diffuse textures as I’m just after shadow/AO. So I can just delete all the materials from the Cycles file. Just need to make sure the lights/UV’s are the same. Then, I can bake the shadows/AO in cycles and then apply those textures back in the original file. hhmmm…Always easier said than done!
EDIT 2: Also, I was hoping to simply render out the shadow maps, and just simply add them to the materials as a multiply texture, which would normally be fine. As I want an individual shadow map for each stage, I will need to make a copy of every material, for every stage, so they can have the relevant shadow map applied.
You can probably begin to see why I have been hesitant to go down the baking route!
Have you tried that plug-in yet? It does all of that for you. Unwrap, assign UVs, create texture in each material. Need to create new materials for a new level? Make copies of the materials in your new scene (do a Full Copy), and hit ‘Delete Lightmap’ on your new level, and bake a new lightmap. It takes two mouse clicks instead of one, but you should be able to handle that 
I have been playing around with it a bit and I can vouch for it working, and working very nicely. No need to copy it over to the internal renderer or anything, you can bake right in the game engine. It does not bake AO, unfortunately, just the lightmap.
If you plan on baking your lighting in cycles, well…you’re not going to find a quick n’ easy solution for that. It is a lot of extra work and time for not a huge increase in quality, in a scene like yours where everything is more or less neutral white light, and the subtleties of indirect lighting will not be noticed much by the player.
I’m gunna have a go with it in a controlled environment first. So I don’t go messing up my game before I know what I’m doing.
So what I gather from what your saying is, is that I was correct about having to have copy materials for every stage… Which means I’m going to end up with a lot of materials as it multiplies with every level.
There’s about 4 main materials (2 x wall, 1 x floor/roof and 1 x vent shafts) excluding all the jump pads etc. I aim to have about 20 levels. So, 80+ materials PLUS all the additional materials.
It could all get very messy very quickly! I’ll see if I go for it.
Right. I’ve had a little play with it. My game uses a lot of spot lights, which in the BGE doesn’t have shadows. But, I can temporarily switch over to Blender internal, do the light-map magic. It will then calculate shadows for the point lights and then I can just switch back to BGE. So thats actually really nice.
I can also see what you mean about when I create new levels. I can just take each modular piece, make a copy, then make a new copy of each of the materials. Make the level and then do the light map again for that level. I guess I just have to accept that I’m going to have a lot of materials!!
New problem to overcome though. Taking all of the modular pieces I have now… and re-assigning copy materials to every single one for all the current levels. I’m trying to think of a good work flow to do it without having to go through every single object individually.
(Thank you for your help on this! I appreciate it! )
To make life a bit easier, I think I can get away with excluding all the props/rotating platforms/glass panels etc from all this work. Literally just applying light-maps to the floors, walls and ceiling. So thats a plus side! 
Latest video update:
As I want to really polish this game off and publish it for sale, I decided to start a Kickstarter page for a small fund.
Please support my Kickstarter funding page for this game! Even if you just share the page on FB or whatever, that would be a huge help and I would be massively grateful!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/34359686/jumper
I wasn’t really sure how much to go for, so I just went for that amount
So to the kickstarter:
I don’t know why you need 500£ but it sounds much for me, as you only need 100£ for greenlight. Where will the rest go?
Also from what I see now, the game is not ready to really be sold yet, since you only have like 15 test chambers finished. If people pay for your game, they really want to receive something to keep them entertained for some hours at least. Your kickstarter sounds like your game is already that long, which it isn’t.
Normally I’m a fan of making such blender games free, unless you don’t spend years on them, like Krum or some other big blender games. That’s why I make all my games free…
But good luck with the campaign, hoping the best for you.
To be fair, the amount was pretty random, I wasn’t really sure how much to put!
I know the game isn’t ready yet. I have a lot of work to do but I am making very fast progress on the game now. My work commitments aren’t huge at the moment. So I’ve got a lot of time to keep on it.
I personally think once it’s finished, providing there are enough chambers, it deserves to be sold for a small price. I think it’s perfectly fair for anybody to try and sell their games if they have really put the effort in to making it a good product. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting it to be huge. If anything it will be one of those £1.99 bargain games 
hehe I really want to see if I can do it.
EDIT: Woohoo, it’s already received backer #1
Ok that’s great and sounds reasonable. You’d maybe need something to get some more attention on your game.
Thank you for your continued support blenderrendersk
Yeah, I’ve posted on a few indie game forums and tried to use Facebook quite a bit. Although, the kickstarter page is helping to get everything else seen! My YouTube channel views/likes/subs have suddenly gone up So I guess even if the funding fails, it will have had a good impact
Not much to update at the moment visually. I’ve created a couple more chambers.
I’ve been working on improving performance. I’ve started to merge all the modular pieces, chamber by chamber. Simply joining the pieces and deleting all the double vertices has cut the number of vertices drastically.
Its great! I love the idea and the clean style of the rooms, but theres a bug that you can walk up the walls. I hope you can fix it, because for harder level its cheating. But all in all one of my favourite blender games. :yes: respect
Hey wilBoss, thank you for the feedback! Glad you like it!
Can you tell me how you manage to do that? Do you just jump on to the wall? I had somebody else mention that too me. I’m not sure how recent the last upload is, so I might have fixed it since as I made quite a few changes to the physics etc
This is a great game, also you should try to increase the Friction of the rotating platform on the material to avoid the character sliding