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[Luno]

This looks great, really atmospheric and original. Great devlog too!

thank you!

yea, the point you and pineapple raise is valid, i should see if there is a better way to distribute the title screens. The time of day thing is sort of thematic, but I could have it be based on gameplay, at random, or something else.

I'm not worried about making sure every player sees all 4 variations...I would rather it to be a sort of special surprise that takes some time to notice...but perhaps I could add some way to switch the screen at will. If you only play at night, you could always just change your system clock to see the alternate screens

[Pineapple]

If you only play at night, you could always just change your system clock to see the alternate screens

That's true, but suppose neither of us happened to see that post on this thread and so never knew about the other seasons? Most players won't think to see what happens if change their system clocks. Even those who would think to often won't do so because of how it might affect applications other than your game. (Or maybe just because they're lazy, or maybe they don't know how.)

[Luno]

If you only play at night, you could always just change your system clock to see the alternate screens

That's true, but suppose neither of us happened to see that post on this thread and so never knew about the other seasons? Most players won't think to see what happens if change their system clocks. Even those who would think to often won't do so because of how it might affect applications other than your game. (Or maybe just because they're lazy, or maybe they don't know how.)

All very true...but I'm more or less OK with that?

I think we're touching on an interesting topic here: to what extent should you spend dev time making content that not every player will see? I'd be curious to hear more opinions on this.

Personally I like the idea that only a few people may discover things and that exclusivity is sort of a reward for their time and would tend to want to lean into that...but I am also sympathetic to the line of thinking that you spend all this time making something, you want players to be able to enjoy it, so is it really wise to make it less accessible?

[Pineapple]

My vote will always be for making games as accessible as possible. Extra content that only the most interested players are likely to see, because in gameplay they went above and beyond: Awesome! Extra content that many players will be unlikely to see simply because of accessibility issues: Ehhhh, I think it's better avoided. (And I think that making different game content available at different times of day counts as an accessibility issue for players who are unable to play at arbitrary times of day - which is going to be a majority of gamers, who typically have jobs and otherwise busy schedules!) Addressing accessibility issues can only make it possible for more people to play and enjoy your game.

[_glitch]

I love the style, the environment and the idea! I will follow the development and I hope that this project won't die.

[Luno]

Everyone loves a tasteful gradient now and again, but the quantization that occurs when representing a smooth gradient with 8-bit color can introduce some gnarly color banding. Dithering can help!

Here's an example of color banding as it appears in-game, before and after dithering



The same image as above, but with the brightness cranked to highlight the difference



ENHANCE! A higher contrast, up-close version

The basic trick of dithering is to introduce some randomness, or noise. Since all of the gradients in my game are essentially transparent sprites, I modified their shaders to randomly vary the alpha of each transparent pixel in the gradient by a small amount. The random part ended up being the trickiest bit: I got the best results by randomly sampling from a pre-calculated blue noise texture and using that value to vary the alpha in the range of [-0.02, 0.02], uniformly.

I learned how to do this by reading this article (be sure to grab the free, pre-calculated blue noise textures too).

I also learned a ton from this GDC talk from PlayDead (the team that made Inside and Limbo). The talk gives you some high-level information about dithering, and also a few useful snippets and references (the accompanying slides can be found here).

The aforementioned talk is also how I learned of this shader toy page that has CG/HLSL-style code which I used to generate noise. This is also where the Inside guys got the uniform-to-triangular distribution code.

To save you the trouble, here's the Unity-friendly version that I ended up with
http://pastebin.com/HngLF5Fr

I didn't actually end up using the triangle-distribution remapping since it didn't seem to make a huge difference, but I plan to experiment with this to try dithering the entire scene using an image effect instead of the individual gradients.

[Luno]

I love the style, the environment and the idea! I will follow the development and I hope that this project won't die.

Thanks again for your support! I hope so too ^_^;

[Luno]

I didn't actually end up using the triangle-distribution remapping since it didn't seem to make a huge difference, but I plan to experiment with this to try dithering the entire scene using an image effect instead of the individual gradients.

Alright guys, update on dithering. I'm aware this is sort of a boring topic, but I wanted to share the results of my further (and probably final) experimentation.

So the major sources of banding in my game are gradient transparencies and image effects. To combat the banding, noise needs to be added before any quantization occurs, which means before the colors end up on the screen/in a render texture. This means that I actually had to add noise to any shaders that draw gradients, and again in each image effect script that introduces banding (vignetting and bloom in my case; I'm using Unity's standard assets with some minor tweaks).

Adding the noise to the vignette produced some decent results, but the bloom banding seems to be an unavoidable symptom of the Gaussian blur so the noise was not really helping much.



The banding is very subtle with the vignette, but in motion you really notice it as a sort of dirty lens effect. In this case I used the triangular distribution and it worked quite well. I think the fact that the noise animates really helps with the dirty lens problem.

I'm glad I decided to spend the time learning about dithering and improving my knowledge of shaders/render pipeline these last few days, but man am I ready to move on

[kinnas]

I appreciate the immense paleness of the protagonist. Relatable.

[Luno]

Ha yes, well you can actually choose your own skin color, hair, and the like 

[Luno]

Here's some more concept/character art, this time for a race of sentient mushroom people! The mushrooms they summon are effectively land-mines with various detrimental effects. Rumors passed among the shamans of the forest suggest that you may accidentally stumble upon the entrance to their hidden village while undergoing a vision quest.




...and here are some progress shots 


Here's the iPhone photo of my original pencil work


Cleaned up a bit with some contrast and a faux depth of field effect


The coloring was done in photoshop with my trusty mouse

[Luno]

I've got a bunch of game stuff to post soonish, including the first piece of music,  but it's not quite ready yet. Here's some more art stuff that I've been working on in the mean time

[Luno]

As promised, the first piece of music for the game!
♫ https://soundcloud.com/lunomusic/beginning-of-a-journey/s-3f8ot ♫

This is an edit of the opening theme music for the title screen/menus and character create. There will be alternate arrangements of this for the different seasons I'm planning to do for the title screen. I believe this version is "spring", but I'll likely be doing more arranging so that may change in the future. The basic tune is all there though.

As always, happy to hear any feedback on the mix or anything else (mostly I'm wondering if the delay on the rhodes needs to change).

[rj]

wow.

[Canned Turkey]

This looks so good! Keep up the great work.

[Luno]

wow.

hope that's a good wow ^_^;

if so, thank you!!! if not...also thank you: when you doubt me i only grow stronger

[rj]

trust me, it's a good wow. floored by all of it.

[Luno]

This looks so good! Keep up the great work.

thank you for the inspiration; now I surely will :D

[gimblll]

Really like the atmosphere in this one. Looking forward to seeing (and hearing) more!

[tinyDino]

Dude I am loving the art. Specifically how you leave it to the elements to give the scene detail and leave the ground a solid color. I imagine that can be pretty hard to pull off. props.