Hello everyone!
Since Path to the Sky has been Greenlit I have been working day and night on getting the game closer to release. Heres some of the new stuff!
Build 273 new additions include:
- 1px outline shader for increased readability
- Stuctures have inside/outside elements
- Monsters drop rare, unique upgrades
- You can block and reflect things (such as arrows, or particles by monsters) with your shield
- A permanent buff system that can affect all of your actions (like reflecting)
- Two monsters: Skeleton and Oildbird
- Monsters can carry equipment
- Bombs to remove terrain
In this gif, I had some fun with the shield and told it to reflect 100 arrows for testing purposes. Theres also a bomb, they come in handy because terrain generation isnt perfect yet and some times you just have to remove some blocks. I dont plan to make it any kind of "mining" game or anthing though. Spelunky style removal, at best.
With the addition of the structure "insides", the dark background has kind of turned into a problem. I mean, visibility and contrast on the bright blue sky wasnt that great, but for some colors (like the players legs for example) the contrast on the dark greys was absolutely terrible, so I added outlines. This has a serious impact on how things read, it makes everything more blobby and heavy but also gives things a simpler silhouette. One good side effect that I got out of this is that I can visually separate important things from eyecandy. With the crapload of particles floating around, the outlines (being rendered even when theres a particle on top of the sprite) add a lot of clarity.
Creating the shader also required me to switch to "true" lowres to get clean 1px outlines. This kind of hurts some of the more subtle pixel things that I had going on, like the grass (which involved a lot of subpixel vertex movements) or scaling sprites on impact. Im starting to like it though. Its different, but I think its an overall improvement.
I'd be happy to get some feedback on it though!
Have a great weekend everyone!
It feels fluid and very dynamic with these new changes. I love the idea of a large variety of items and/or upgrades, and the 'buff' system sounds equally as rewarding!
Great work dek! I'm always excited to see what you'll come up with next xD
Thanks mate:)
This looks great. Do you plan to Integrate gamepad support for this game later?
I am developing this game for gamepad mainly :)
This is so smooth and fluid. Also the 100 arrows thing should be kept(as a really rare drop) because why not?
Hehe. I think its really broken. It jsut clears rooms completely :O
all these additions look amazing, my only concern is the outline shader as i feel it takes a lot of the original beauty out, maybe you could try playing around with the colours of the outline?
I was never fond of outlines around sprites in games, either. Just throwing this out there, but what if there was an option to turn it on/off, or set its opacity/color? It's close to a defining visual characteristic, but I think the added option would be nice :)
Its optional indeed! its all shader based, and yes, you can change the opacity too. I also made a way for it to react differently to certain background colors; so its less harsh versus the bright sky. thats not in the gif though.
Ahh see, you've got it all covered ^-^ Thanks
Very cool.