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[Daniel Linssen]

Update 5: Level unlocks and refactoring

The level unlock system is more or less complete now.



I've spent some time trying to fix up parts of the background code. Too many things were either hard coded or written poorly enough that it was becoming difficult to make progress. This is the sort of work I dread doing, so hopefully I won't have to do much more of it after this. To celebrate I'm going to bump the progress meter up to 20%.

I may have also spent too much time "studying" some classics on my friends' new arcade.

[Daniel Linssen]

Update 6: And I'm Back

First of all I'd like to apologise for suddenly abandoning my dev log for six weeks. At some point I decided I needed to take a break from The Sun and Moon and make a quick, unrelated game to recharge myself. The quick game went from being a two day project to taking almost a week. After that I started working on TSAM again, but for a while I felt too uncertain about how things were going and so I remained very far under the radar.

And then I made another game for Gameboy Jam 3.

And then another game for Ludum Dare 30.

Fortunately, I've been working full time on TSAM since then.

The biggest changes I've made are:

• I introduced multiple color palettes by making use of shaders.
• Everything has had its resolution doubled, so that by default the game runs at 1x scale instead of 2x and tiles are 32px instead of 16px.
• The level map has been reworked and is close to being finalized.
• Many small particle effects and animations have been added in.

I'll go into much more detail on each of these points in my next post, which will hopefully be in a couple of hours.

[alvarop]

Really digging the level selection screen, makes it look like there's so much content!

[Daniel Linssen]

Update 7: 1x Scale

After a lot of umming and ahhing I decided things would look better at twice the resolution. Tiles went from 16px wide to 32px wide and the default scale became 1x instead of 2x. This meant going through all the code and adjusting UI positions, physics, collision boxes, tile calculations, and more, as well as redoing all sprites, tiles and particles.



It took a long time to get right...



Here's a mockup comparison of the UI. I made this to help me decide whether it was worth doubling the resolution.



Here's what the map currently looks like. You'll notice that the medals have been changed as well, I'll go into that later.



And here's what things look like in game.

[Daniel Linssen]

Update 8: Palettes

I spent a while teaching myself some of the basics about how shaders (GLSL ES) work. In the end I'm using shaders only for palette swapping, but properly understanding how they work will be hugely useful in future projects. Since I was teaching myself shaders as I built my palette swapping shader, I started by making a very simple grayscale shader by just taking the green value of each pixel.



I then fed this gray value into a HSV gradient equation I came up with.



Because I wanted to do more than only use straight HSV gradients, I set it up so that I could feed in an array of 8 colors for the shader to use.

Haemo colors, red, white and black, ugly purple gradient, Roguelight colors.

I then made it possible to switch between different palettes.



And finally I assigned different palettes to different regions of the map.



Overall I had quite a bit of fun with shaders.

diffuse, mistake, radial effect, outline.

The title also went through a few revisions before I finally settled on something thin and simple.






And with all of that, the game is now coming to Steam near the end of October.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/321560

[Krisjet]

Love both this game and Roguelight, and I'm simply baffled by the Sun and Moon mechanic. I don't think I'd think of it in a million years

Love the upscaling of the graphics, great that you're using it for higher fidelity without changing the looks. Looking forward to release!

[dittomat]

Looking incredible! really good call on scaling up the art, looks really really good. Also it's so much fun to see how you fumbled around with shaders, makes me want to get into that myself! :D Will some of those crazy colorschemes be in the final game(red/black/white for instance looks awesome)? :D

[NinthPower]

I love everything you do Daniel for reals.

[rj]

just played the ludum dare version because this is the first i've seen this devlog.

i loved it, though i will say the music cheesed me off a bit; was really hyper-repetitive, which made me wanna cry/quit on harder levels because it just makes the whole experience off-putting.

i guess what i'm saying is: please make sure you have full 3 minute tracks instead of 30 second loops or whatever it was

OTHER THAN THAT

this looks fantastic

[Wonkyth]

i guess what i'm saying is: please make sure you have full 3 minute tracks instead of 30 second loops or whatever it was

Fear not, Dubmood is doing the music this time.

[oahda]

Another slugcat! Except not a cat. Neat animations!

[sidbarnhoorn]

This looks very cool! :-)