Summary:
In which a level gains more rooms; doors gain depth; an icon for a codex-entry is made; an encounter is written and logic-scripted; a moon gains an in-space appearance; other moons and planets gain some shading; and a side-project allows rearranging and deletion.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows once again the Arcane Moon--but this time as seen from "space"!
The week just past continued to focus primarily on the Arcane Moon, albeit that while it included level-building work, it also branched out from there:
To start with, that level-building work: Two new rooms have been added to the Arcane Moon, both being storerooms. One is small, and contains steel crates; the other is large, and contains a miscellany of items useful to the Arcanists of the moon:
And you might note another change within the first of the two screenshots just above: doors are now three-dimensional!
This is another step on the journey from the game's original near-entirely top-down look towards something with a bit more "depth".
It's a step that I resisted for some time, I think due to concerns about the complications that it might incur. And indeed, there were some complications--but nothing too dire, I feel.
Conversely, the top-down look of the doors had somewhat bothered me for a while: they no longer quite fitted with the semi-3D walls.
And indeed, with this change, I feel that they fit the look of the game rather better!
See for example this door from the Vertical Slice Moon:
Returning to the Arcane Moon specifically, in the week just past I attended to a few non-level-building tasks. For two, I created an icon for the moon's codex-entry, and I set in place some writing and logic for the encounter with the arcanist who provides the "mana crystal" metroidvania-upgrade.
Furthermore, and as shown in the first screenshot of the post, I implemented the moon's appearance within "space"!
Now, as with the moon's appearance within its levels, the shape of the thing provided a minor challenge. Indeed, not only did it have a non-round profile, but it presented non-round surfaces to the sun, thus affecting its lighting.
This, however, proved fairly easy to solve: Some extensions to the default "moon" shader allowed me to have it optionally make use of geometry-normals, enabling the lighting that I wanted. And a bit of custom geometry attached to the default moon-background (which was scaled down in order that it be hidden) provided both the profile and the aforementioned normals.
Combined with a custom texture, the moon's appearance was achieved!
And as with the changes that enabled the moon's in-level appearance, these changes may well prove useful for other moons in the future!
Now, there was one more uncertainty attached to this: I wanted the Arcane Moon to be not only
lit, but also
shaded: that would aid in conveying the moon's shape. But other moons were not so shaded, bearing only highlights--thus producing an inconsistency in the aesthetics of the game.
So I tried introducing shading to the other moons, and to planets--and found that I rather liked it! I feel that it gives the moons and planets rather more form:
And as per usual, there were other changes, fixes, and tweaks enacted in the week just past that don't seem worth detailing here!
As to my side-project, I implemented one new set of features: it's now possible to rearrange and delete options within a choice--complete with their connections updating in response!
Which leaves me now with perhaps the trickiest part of all: figuring out how to approach and how to present in UI the non-interactive portions of a visual novel...
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^