Within the arch.
The portal follows the shape of each altar. Wispy souls rise behind the carvings, with open sky still visible between them.
The first portal pass made the altars more active, but its large oval surfaces competed with the monuments. Shaun’s correction was precise: keep the portals inside the arches and make them much more transparent. This revision brings that direction into the playable Unreal build.
The opening determines the effect
Each patron now has a small surface fitted to the actual opening in its altar. The veil sits behind the ornamentation: Ilveth’s suspended heart, Veyra’s armillary and skull, Vessara’s roots, and the remaining pieces of Vorr’s mirror stay visible in front.
The centre is transparent. Fine moving strands and fading spirits provide the light, with no solid vortex disc or expanding oval over the sculpture. The game retains its existing lighting and mesh proportions, so these are interpretations of the concept paintings rather than identical images.
Something is always moving
A new AI-generated, transparent hooded-soul sprite supplies the wispy detail. Original Unreal shader animation varies its scale, drift and tilt, while smooth light strands pass through the aperture. Gold, crimson, pale blue and violet distinguish the four patrons.
The souls are present before an offering. Their motion accelerates continuously when a ritual begins, instead of snapping to a different animation phase.
A sacrifice disturbs the doorway
Purification makes the spirits and light surge. Taking an enemy altar adds a red glow, trembling contents, existing spatial ritual sounds and nearby camera rumble. The camera-shake setting still applies.
The veil remains inside the opening throughout. Cancelling a ritual restores the patron’s colour; completed banishment extinguishes the defeated portal. The presentation reads the existing soul and ritual rules without changing their costs or timing.
Checked in the playable build
The separate Mac app passed 911 gameplay and native-input assertions. Nine new portal checks cover fitting to the actor, collision, idle visibility, purification, hostile colour, cancellation and banishment. The rendered opening-to-Limbo journey also completed, visiting all four courts and saving the first oath.
A matched short altar sample was essentially unchanged in frame time from the previous build. The new effect replaces the old rings and moving instances with one small surface per altar, but the campaign still has measured loading hitches; this is not a promise of 60 frames per second.
Next comes an uninterrupted laptop campaign playthrough, with attention to transparency, sacrifice intensity, sound balance and the transition from preparation to battle. Performance hitches and final voice pacing remain the next bounded improvements.
