[Released] Pokémon: Trick-Or-Treat

[Patricipa]

Starting our weekly updates:

I was playing around earlier this week with lighting effects, trying to see if I can get an idea of what I might want. Went through a couple of the fog tutorials on Relic Castle (thanks, Elle and Aki!) and followed their examples, muddling around with things until I got something that looked good. The following is a mockup, not an in-game example, but I think if I can get this kind of effect, it'll help sell the premise a bit:

It's roughly the same image from the last post just with an extra layer of lighting effects added on top, if you wanted to compare the two! Gonna see if I can get fogs working in-game and if I can get them to look kind of like this, will help make the game even more special I feel :)

That's about all I wanted to share this time. Still working on tiles and etc. Thanks for reading!

That's so different. o.O An eerie feeling comes across and when you put fog there too... Can someone see anything then? ?_?

 

[Kildario]

That's so different. o.O An eerie feeling comes across and when you put fog there too... Can someone see anything then? ?_?

Ideally the walkable areas will be about as dark as the normal pokemon nighttime color tint. There's a chance the mockup's a bit dark (and iirc pokemon uses a dark blue over the black-purple I used, which makes it look a bit lighter, too.) Along the edges are much darker, but the player shouldn't be able to walk there anyway so visibility shouldn't be a concern with that :)

I have considered just using the time of day tint and calling it a day, but the fogs would allow for more variable lighting I think, like the darker edges and brighter near light sources. Though all this depends on how the engine handles fogs, which is my goal to check this week. A few fog examples I found showed loading them when the player enters the map, but I'd need them loaded when the map is loaded else there'll be weird transition glitches lol

 

[Kildario]

Following up on the fogs, I did a quick test in-game to get them to show up. Took a bit of tweaking but look, no seams!



That's the border between the starting area and the first route, now slightly darker! Note that I did this test on the current release version of the game, hence the old tiles. Of course, the above screenshot could've been achieved via the time-of-day tint, but what I like about the fogs conceptually is they allow for more variable lighting, like this:



where I darkened the unwalkable area in the trees to make it, idk, "spookier."

Fogs interact with connected maps in a bit of a funny way as they're tiled across the map and this is somewhat of an inelegant solution to that (where I just gave the fog images a lot of empty space at the bottom so you can't see the tiling at all.) Ideally we'd just... disable the fog tiling, but I haven't figured out where that is yet. The bigger issue with using very large images is it could introduce extra game lag, so I'll be on the lookout for that as I experiment. If the fogs ruin performance too much, I can always just use the flat day tint, nbd.

So moderate success on the fogs! I also started playing around with some UI redesign, but no mockups for that yet, sorry. I keep going back and forth on whether UI elements should be sleek and modern or, like, spooky-ornate. Maybe both? Idk, we'll see if I can get something that looks good.

 

[Patricipa]

I don't know what UI elements are, but I would like to see what you meant with this and these modern/spooky-ornate design.^^