Thanks, everyone!!
I love that you are experimenting with making your own sound effects, sounds like a lot of fun
I don't necessarily have the best equipment or know-how, but being a solo project the game is going to be rough around many of its edges, and I kind of like that lo-fi vibe anyway, so maybe the audio can be too
And it's definitely fun, yeah!
From what I remember, traditional Foley for snow is custard powder or maize flour in a bag, and squeezing it for the scrunchy sound. Wonder how that compares to the real thing!
Oh wow, hope we don't run into a
coconut effect then
making Ao and Ao's position on the screen look even flatter.. like a painting!
I think possibly I like that given the painterly direction of the graphics in general, but we'll have to see how it feels as development progresses~
As for design, I don't have every detail pinned down but my overall idea in terms of gameplay as well as story (and the interaction of the two) is pretty well established and written down, just not shared extensively in the thread yet.
I do want to leave some things open to experimentation, too.
EDIT:Can't make my mind up about those trees. I have to play most games on fairly low-res on this computer anyway to get them to run well, so why not my own as well? The reason the leaf shader is slow is due to discarding pixels where there are no leaves. But not doing so and trying to do it all with alpha blending without depth writes is really tricky, creates more work, looks worse, causes shadow issues. And it seems most modern games do do this for cutout shaders like this? So I think I'm going back to the discard method for now.
I also fixed up some visual bugs with the falling snow and added it back. It too previously made the game slow down so I had removed it but it looks like it runs just fine now that I've fixed those rendering blunders I mentioned in the update. I was even able to add more particles without an issue!
But again due to the heavier leaf shader and recording at the same time, this GIF is a little stuttery unfortunately. But it runs fine when not recording.
I'll keep working on that later, maybe look into directly outputting frames from the game like someone suggested earlier in the thread.
GIF also got really graphically crushed this time, so here's a screenshot for good measure:
EDIT 2:And here it is. Thanks for the tip!
The result is very smooth (the fact that I have to play at half resolution to get it not to record twice the intended size on my retina display helps too) altho I don't really like the dithering, and the files are large and ezgif optimisation doesn't really do anything.
Library is fantastic and only took me like five minutes to add, but I had to mess around for like half an hour to get a good GIF at a size that works with Imgur and Twitter.
But I think I'll record this way from now on!
Also now that you can see the game at its real frame rate for the first time it's probably a bit like people who find the Hobbit films hard to watch for their 48 FPS but. I've actually been toying with the idea of reducing the framerate a little bit intentionally to make it look more like animation, but without slowing input or camera responsiveness down. We'll see!
