Arbiter - Monthly Recap - November 2023

Greetings, gamers!

Time's weird. It feels like it goes by so quickly throughout the month, but the second I start writing these it slows back down. They force me to go back and really look at my progress, and even after those less productive months I always come away feeling a bit better about where I'm at. It's a nice little mental checkpoint that helps me reset and gear up for the next page in my story.

...and apparently that story is 29 YEARS OLD now so I should really get cooking on this Arbiter game, huh.

I Don't SEE Colour (Literally)

Something extremely annoying happened this month that was bound to happen eventually, but took so long that I'm angry I didn't see it sooner. It was two things, actually. Two minor inconveniences that I had no reason to care about beforehand but had since been silently rolling 1d4 psychic damage to me every day for the past year.

The first problem was that, because I didn't know any better, I was using a limited pixel format that basically killed a lot of the lights and darks in my monitor. This is why a lot of my colors were coming out darker on devices other than my PC. On top of this, I had also adjusted the color settings on my monitor years ago, so not only were all of my colors using a smaller spectrum, but they weren't even accurately representing the colors they should have.

This essentially led to me endlessly tweaking my colors on loop because every time I'd check them on another device, they'd look different than on my PC. I assumed it was just the brightness of my phone or my eyes catching new problems, but nope, it's because they were literally outputting different values. Neat!

Honestly I was more relieved once I found out, but it's still frustrating in hindsight. Once I switched to a Full RGB pixel format it was like finally rolling the Wisdom Save I needed—my eyes once again my own.

...or so I thought. Obviously since I was making the environments within those limitations, the second I removed them, the colours were just completely fucked. I had a bit of a crisis because I realized this was how the game actually looked, and it looked like shit. I spent some time being pissed at myself, but with an exhaustive sigh I went back in to change literally every environment texture I'd made to better utilize the new color spectrum.

This doesn't mean I'm suddenly a God of Colour or anything (more a person of colour, really). But it has removed a lot of the question marks emitting from my brain whenever I look at the game, and that feels nice. The colours still aren't quite where I want them to be, but hopefully they look a little more balanced in the coming months as I get used to the new spectrum. All in all this is definitely a W, it just took a little while to get here. Oh well!

Oh My God We Have an Art Style

Ideally this is something you should say earlier than 6~ years into your project, but here we are. While the colour issues definitely upset me at first, I found myself with a surge of inspiration afterwards that led to some nifty little developments!

The first was the biggest hassle by far, but was so, so worth it in the end. It's subtle, but the game is now using an effect called Edge Detection to give things a slightly more stylized look. What the effect does is essentially draws outlines around the silhouettes (and surfaces, if you want) of every object on screen. It's a common effect used in tons of games like Sable, Borderlands, Valkyrie Elysium, etc. It has its issues though, and figuring them out in a way that worked with my existing cel-shader and environments was a journey, but somehow we actually got there. 

I could write an entire post on how I solved my specific problems with edge detection, but we'll save that for another day (right next to all the other patron-exclusive posts I really, really suck at actually making). But to put it simply, I followed this tutorial by the wonderful Steven Sell and reached out to him for help when I got stuck. We had some back and forth discussing my specific use-cases, problems, and potential solutions, and he ended up teaching me A LOT about rendering and offered some ideas that really helped steer me in the right direction. I was really close to giving up on the effect at one point, but I genuinely had one of those brain blast moments that just solved everything immediately—it was wild. It's a bit much to explain here, but suffice it to say it worked, and now we have outlines! Bless your beautiful soul, Mr. Sell. 

From here, I started iterating. I found that retaining some colour in the outlines instead of going full-black suited the game's vibe better, so I kept the effect pretty subtle. However, what I immediately found was that the softer shading of the environment was starting to clash with the more stylized look of the outlines and characters. To alleviate that, I changed the environment lighting to a (soft) cel-shader that helps keep things stylized, and added a faint rim light to keep things from getting too dark. Combine all three and voila! Art Direction™!

I realize it's not a super-crazy effect or anything, but I'm really proud of myself for making something I'm genuinely happy with—it's a rare feeling as an artist. Having a unifying factor like this really brings everything together and it's gotten me excited to work on future environments, which is a sensation I haven't really experienced in the year or so learning this stuff. I'm sure it'll continue to change as I evolve, iterate, and get more feedback, but as of right now I feel like I've reached a really big milestone that's gonna set the pace for everything else moving forward. Another mental checkpoint, I suppose.

The next step will be working on architecture, which I did a bit of this month before getting into all this edge detection stuff. While I only made a few assets before working on the effect, I can already see a huge difference in how well the edge detection works on them. Since architecture tends to have much harsher angles, there's a lot more "edges" to detect, enhancing the effect. Yippee!

These assets are still very much WIPs, but I'm hoping to flesh things out in the next month or so!

Cooling Off

All in all, November was a bit crazy! It was filled with headaches and self-doubt but ended with a bit of style and tons of growth. I'm sure there's still plenty of psychic damage in my future, but come what may I feel like I'm on much stabler ground now with the new art style. 

I'll probably be working on architecture for most of December, but I do plan to take two weeks around Christmas time to chill with family and just reset. The next recap will be our FOURTH annual recap (this is not helping me feel any younger), but I'm excited to go over how the environments have evolved throughout the year. I do wish I had made this progress faster, but either way, I am substantially closer to the finish line now than I was a year ago, and that feels pretty damn good. Once again, we've still got a ways to go but we're getting there! 

Anyways, thanks as always for your support everyone! Interestingly enough these recaps seem to get longer the more confident I am in my work, so hopefully this time next year I've got novels to share. When I'm... 30.

Cheers I guess,
Jordy