Malevolent Planet 2D - Back to Lighting
Hey! This status update will be valid for the next 1-2 weeks, so other than art posts and maybe a poll or two there won't be another one of these long essays :D
I'll be working for the next 7 days and then there'll be my short holiday break, so here are my plans for this month and for the development progress for this week, they're pretty ambitious but they're worth it.
Overall Tasks:
Updating the Unity version I'm using to the latest LTS, this can introduce bugs so I am being careful and testing it as we go. It's necessary because there are some bugs on the previous latest LTS version I was using and maybe we'll get overall more stability with this update.
Reimporting Unity's lighting system (Unity URP) to the game because I realized in order to build the village and the city/the hub we need proper lights and shaders that would create interesting glows, shadows, neon light effects, volumetric lighting, additive/overlap look to some sprites like the camp fire...
Dark background and bright colored lights are basically a cheatcode for creating an atmospheric cyberpunk-like level, and they're also great in general for sci-fi games. Below is an experiment with casting 2d shadows using dynamic lighting movements.
Let's hope that this time URP is actually ready for production so these efforts won't be wasted, because last time I tried it it was a bit of a mess and I had to do a big move from using URP to using the default rendering pipeline. Unfortunately the default one will get deprecated/replaced soon so I needed to make the switch back sooner or later.
Reimporting the textures in the game to use point filtering instead of bilinear, because it's sharper and more true to how the sprites were actually drawn (it's a lot of effort to draw semi pixel-art-ish art assets)
Finish drawing the new animation for scene, it's pretty complex and it'll feature the first x-ray content.
Fix android rendering issue that's not reproducible on any other platforms, it's probably the graphics api (shown in the preview picture to see what the struggle of game development can be)
Finish building all the village art assets, including the buildings that took a while to get to a satisfying level because there's a lot of effort put into making nice levels especially from now on.
Use Sprite Atlases everywhere in the game. Computers like multiples of 2 or 4 apparently and when I import textures into unity I need to make sure that they're always something like 64 instead of 65 because then the compression will be messed up and increase the size of the built project.
This means that all art sprites used in levels will now be part of sprite atlases that will optimize their import process which would hopefully lead to smaller build sizes, better looking textures, better performance (reduced draw calls)
Improve the gameplay UI, a poll related to that is coming
So there's a ton of work to do and that doesn't include dialogues, building the sequenced flow that represents actual gameplay from point A to point B, animating the scene that's being drawn...
The idea with all these improvements is to:
Make the game look much better (at least post-ISA) so the eye-candy won't be reserved only to animated scenes.
Make the game run much better.
Improve the "feel" of the game.
Introduce new content that explores popular niches we haven't explored yet.
Learn to build nicer-looking levels and art assets so the city/the hub will look as good as it can.
There's also work I need to do on the pop-up system, and semi-related to that is improving the gameplay UI a bit.
Since my next days will be very busy, I wish you a great beginning to June and let's hope when I return around 20th that a lot of these tasks will be done so I'll be able to focus on the scenes and dialogues and building better looking maps.