hi! lena here again. now that the big announcement is over and done with, i'm back to regular development on the game, slow and steady as i can. unfortunately, literally right after the announcement i had to go in for some annoying dental surgery which left me a bit out of it this weekend. so i did what any developer might do while recovering & messed around with particle effects and visual polish (plus implementing some more cutscenes).
i'm still learning the ins and outs of gamemaker's particle system, so i thought a nice first step would be to make some floaty dust motes that randomly appear in front of light sources. it's a pretty common indie dev trick to give a bit more depth and motion to a 2d environment, so hey.
given the small resolution i'm working with (350x270), it really only makes sense to use single pixel sized particles (until i do some specific shapes like fireflies or falling leaves or something). so i made an emitter that generates very slow meandering dots that start translucent, grow in opacity, then fade away. because i rendered the particles in white, i can re-color them to match light colors & adjust opacity to match the overall contrast against background brightness.
a sneak peek inside the gamemaker level editor... the round dealies are particle emitters. the rest are various visualization for interaction spots & other fun things...
there's a lot of different types of light sources & light isn't always super visible aside from little flares and light pools i place in the areas, alongside the dynamic shadows. so having the motes really helps sell the illusion of lighting despite there not being a "real" lighting system.
some yellow-ish motes emanating from these orb lights
the other little visual detail i added is something that is pretty subtle in action, but i wanted to try messing with a static noise overlay to chop up the "clean" feeling of the rendering style. the game uses very clean-edged stepped shading (i'm avoiding gradients wherever possible to keep it looking clean), but having a bit of visual noise does a lot to add to the mood of a slightly off putting environment. while areal isn't a horror game in the strictest sense, it uses unease to reflect the feelings of astra, so i thought it was a nice fit. i might change my mind later, but for now i like it!
as cool as it looks, the noise overlay does make gifs HUGE since it renders every frame differently... so this one has to be really short/cropped
the final stuff on the docket is getting story cutscenes hooked up for the rest of the chapter. all the gameplay except the 1st major boss has been finished up, so it's really all about getting the scenes set up & i can call it playable from start to finish... with a placeholder boss you can just nuke. the boss will take a lot of rigging & scripting to make work, but i'm super looking forward to it as well as beginning on designing out all the spaces in the world beyond astra's home...
more to come! thanks for tuning in
surprise! i'm already writing about some of my first dev activities post-reveal...
while it's more for the benefit of seeing things early, i should do my due diligence and mention that i have a small patreon community who got to check out this dev log a day before i published it here. i don't post about it a lot because it's mostly a supplemental tip jar, but if you contribute at the $5 tier there's a cosy little discord server i run where i post other behind the scenes stuff, talk about cats, and have a Q&A channel alongside discussion of my games (just ESC so far but, eventually that'll be ANOTHEREAL too).
