Lighting and Looks

Perhaps the biggest part of this, both in salience and time spent in the week just past, was the creation of a new tool: an editor for the lighting of levels.

You see, up until the week just past, I had included lighting in my general level-building workflow within Blender. However, this presented a difficulty: as I didn't have my shaders in Blender, I couldn't see what I was doing. I could use a visualisation to see the range of my lights, but not their levels of softness, or their intensities, or how they merged together--or, overall, how they affected the appearance of the level.

So, after some deliberation, I decided to make a simple editor for the purpose.

This editor, now implemented, allows me to load a level; set the level's ambient lighting; and via the mouse and keyboard place, edit, and delete my lights. And, combined with some supporting changes to the handling of lights within rooms and ambient lighting within levels, this new approach seems to work nicely!



Here below you should see a gif showing the overall workflow within the editor. It's from an earlier iteration than the current--note the different UI and light-markers--but it should nevertheless give you and idea of how editing with this tool works:



And concomitantly, I also added support for lighting to a shader that lacked it.

Speaking of shaders, the standard location-shader was updated a little in the week just past.

You see, I had been wrestling on-and-off with the fact that simple tiles, viewed top-down, can feel a little over-uniform, and thus not very interesting.

Decor helped somewhat--but much of that was placed around the edges of the various rooms. I did experiment with adding hand-made cracks and chips to the floors, but this looked to me to be overly painstaking.

But the inspiration came to me to implement some variation in the underlying shader--to add some data to my tiles, and to have the shader interpret this data in a way that would produce a more-varied appearance.

In short, the tile-image now has an additional layer of values packed into its "alpha" (i.e. transparency/opacity) channel. These values are then compared to a noise-value that was already being read by the shader. As the noise-value changes, essentially, so too does the value at which a tile is changed, and the manner in which it changes.

And I do think that it rather helps!

All of the things mentioned thus far contributed towards work on the overall appearance of the tutorial level. You can see much of this in the first screenshot above, but let me post one more screenshot, showing all of lighting, decor, and tile-variation:



Likewise, work was done on the exterior appearance of the moon, both its in-space texture and, more so, the look of its "surface" level.



Remaining with visuals but moving away from the moon itself, in the week just past I also touched up the game's "interaction" icon. Specifically, I updated its appearance, and switched it from appearing over the subject of interaction to appearing over the player:



And last of the visual matters that I intend to report in this blog-post, I made a start on the appearance of an NPC who is encountered in the tutorial level.

But not all work of the week just past was visual in nature: I also made a change to the behaviour and abilities of the "Deceived Acolyte" and "Deceived Cultist" enemies: They can now draw power from the mana crystals that the player can create, becoming more dangerous for the brief lifespan of a crystal. (Just as was already true of the player.)



And of course there were various other tweaks, fixes, and changes that don't seem worth detailing here!

That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^