whew its been a while! I've been really busy but finally getting back into working on the game.
And now I will present a bunch of random semi-interesting features in hopes that the combination makes this an interesting post!
The biggest thing I finished was redoing part of the lighting scripts (wow what a surprise!)
Now its waay easier to add and remove lights from the level (even runtime), and the sizes of the lights are a lot more dynamic. Here's an example of that:
I have 4 different size parameters for each light now. 2 are presented in this gif:
-the area of solid visibility
-the outside edge of visibility where the shadows become fully black
So that gif demonstrates that these values are fairly distant, and that its stretching out the tiles to match the two sizes.
And the two other parameters, for lights with color:
-the area of solid color
-the outside edge of color where the color disappears.
Here are some cool gifs of another part of the light script remake, involving the colored lights:
What I did is I split the colored lights into 2 different layers, one behind the sprites and tiles and one in front. Previously it was very difficult to get lights to look good because I had to make them transparent enough to not completely block out the sprites behind the color and just make it solid, but opaque enough so that the color the palette shader sets it to is the color id like it to be. My solution is to split it into 2 layers so that when they overlap (when nothing is in the way) they produce the colors I'd like, but when a sprite or tile is in the way it doesn't completely block it out with solid color.
That green light does some weird things to the purple tiles too. Kinda trippy
Another big thing I worked on is moving platforms!
I actually completely redid the movement scripts as well to implement this. There's a lot at play here to make this all work. I've designed the movement so that walking with/against the movement makes you faster/slower respectively. and jumping off a platform after running along with its movement lets you maintain that moment up until you land or hit a wall, and jumping off after moving against its movement slowly builds your momentum back up to your default max speed.
Most of that kinda follows real-world physics, but jumping while not pressing a movement key just moves you straight up, not affected by the horizontal movement like it would in the real world.
And now, some weird bugs/glitches!
And finally, something that deserves its own post but I'm putting here anyway:
Lydia of Bright Primate very very kindly wrote 2 complete music tracks for the game!!Have a listen right here:
https://soundcloud.com/lydiamarsalaprimate/shady-flighthttps://soundcloud.com/lydiamarsalaprimate/scary-ghost-birdI'm suuper happy with them! I think Shady Flight fits really well with the cave theme, and Scary Ghost Bird would be really cool in a space or mech/industrial area :O
Listening to them while playing the game is such a cool experience, so I guess you can mimic that a bit by looking at the gifs while you listen, if you want
Thanks for following the game so far! More to come
EDIT: Oh ALSO I forgot to mention, I found out that this entire time since i started using the palette shader, I had one of the colors wrong! And it happened to be the blue color the bird uses haha.
You can probably see why I missed it this whole time, but if you go back you may be able to notice that pretty much all of these gifs have the wrong blue color.
It does look a lot better now, and actually made the blue lights work a lot better, because the shader isn't trying to set it to that very-close-to-white blue, its setting colors to a much less 'white' blue. (its also a bit greener, actually that's why I messed it up, the color is
supposed to be 107,225,255 when it actually was 107,255,255. I just moved the green value up a bit when I mixed up that number)
Community
