april 21, 2023

happy friday! this week I worked a lot on the main color-replacement shader that drives the lighting system, including a custom plugin to encode images with unique textures for different lighting levels.

erm... in other words, the lighting system for the game is (for now) finished! for this week's build, the caves are essentially in complete darkness, but I plan to add light sources that spawn pretty soon. I'm very happy with this lighting system, since it lets me have complete control over how every single pixel on the screen is used. that's pretty essential for a super limited palette and pixel count!

the next big part of the update this week was integrating the BetterTerrain plugin. this allows different terrain "categories" that can connect with each other. this is a huge hole in the vanilla terrain system, so I'm very grateful for this plugin. as a bonus, BetterTerrain is slightly more performant than vanilla too!

(as an aside, in last week's todo list, I had "add variants to wall tiles, driven by noise maps." for now, I'm retracting this. I realized that simply choosing a random wall tile looked pretty good, so I'm lumping this todo item in with biomes, whenever the time is right for that.)

now, you may be thinking that this is a lot in one week for a pet project, and frankly, it was. I'm going to have to take a slower pace than this going forward, in order to keep up with regular updates. I'm really enjoying this project and don't want to burn myself out. luckily, this lighting system was the last big hurdle in the near future! the next few updates should involve more visual aspects, now that the technical stuff is in a good spot :)

~

new features:

- dynamic lighting system, allowing every sprite to have a unique variant in four light levels (currently, only the first two are accessible)

- cave wall tiles now have a "smooth" variant

- decorative sprites no longer clip into the ceiling

questions for feedback:

- thoughts on the lighting system so far?

- how does the player "feel"? do jumps, wall-clings, and wall-jumps feel fair? is the movement speed right for the size of the screen?

- at any point, were you unable to reach somewhere? if so, please share a screenshot that includes the seed!

todo:

- more decorations! some parallax, additional types besides rocks (plants, stalactites/stalagmites), light sources