Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

I was watching one of my son's cartoons today and I noticed they models were using serious amounts of simulated rim lighting . Even though it wasn't a dark scene where you'd usually see such an effect, the result was actually quite effective. The white edge highlighting and ambient occluded creases give a kind of high contrast that is similar to, but different from traditional comic book ink work. I'll be honest, I don't know if there's a specific term for this effect in 3d design, since my major at university was in traditional art. I learned it as part of photography. You can find plenty of tutorials on "what is rim lighting" for photography. It basically means putting your main sources of light behind your subject so that they are lit around the edges. It can produce very arresting photographs, either with an obvious effect when used on a dark subject ... ..,or as part of a fully lit scene to add some subtle highlights. See ho...

In a video game, what is real? This is, strangely, a question that infects many discussions about making games, much more so that those about playing games. Well, some things can be modeled somewhat realistically; ray tracing, shadow casting, physics, real time reflections, on the fly destructible or deformable terrain, goal orientated action planning AI... These are all "realistic" approaches" to making games, or you might say simulation based approaches. Other times people use tricks; pre-baked lighting, animated pseudo-physics, on-rails movement, scripted AI, matcap reflections... These are all cheats, to save development time and processing power. They don't simulate real word physics or behavior but simply try to mimic the results. Players of games are rarely concerned with with such things. Everyone who plays a game knows deep down that it is not real, and they don't expect it to behave realistically. Sometimes they get annoyed with games which show b...

After some feedback about the game in it's current state, it's obvious that the camera was zoomed out too much and the level textures are too high contrast. That's actually something I've talked about before, when talking about how I was going to rework the tile set textures to be lower contrast. The final tilesets will be quite low contrast and perhaps a little flat and boring, but that was always part of the plan. The background is not supposed to be the star of the show. Take a look at this, it's one of my favorite Korean traditional paintings. The background is just background, the figures stand out, except of course for the two guys hiding behind the rocks. :) The artist has used the plain texture of the paper as an element of the painting, not to be covered up, but to be masked and veiled, being here a tree and there a rock and elsewhere the skin of a bathing woman. I've tried to show a little of how the game would look like with low contrast bac...

Going back and making some tweaks to the lighting set up I found I can get a similar result from the classic graphics mode as I can from the more modern style. Per vertex lighting. Can you tell the two modes apart? I can, there is definitely a better quality to the per-pixel lighting, nicer shading, better shading of unlit portions of models, better handling of normals etc... but not enough of an improvement to justify the switch maybe. Per pixel lighting. Per pixel lighting does have some other benefits, such as better materials handling (I can dynamically mix two texture on a single object using a mask) which can give a much better appearance to tilesets. It can also do dynamic shadows, reflective surfaces, normal maps and a whole raft of other stuff. But... I don't intend to use any of those features right now. The game is supposed to run on low end computers, I've chosen to use very low detailed art assets to help with that. Putting a normal map on a very low po...

Another roguelike developer who blogs as VJOinteractive commented on my last blog about the lighting system. Actually lighting is a problem with the blender game engine, because it can have a maximum of 8 light sources. That means either having a single light source and modulating it to take in to account the number of lights in the main viewport (Simple lighting), or using up to 8 lights and moving them around as the camera view moves (dynamic lighting). Dynamic lighting is my preferred option, but it's not easy to represent a single torch with a single light in an isometric view. If I place the light at the location of the torch the top of the walls and anything above the player is not lit. If I place it too high up, the lighting on the character looks wrong. There's also the fact that I'm using an old fashioned graphics mode, per vertex lighting. It's really fast and it'll run on almost any computer, even one with a crappy integrated graphics card. But the l...

I've already talked a bit about how I'm handling the layout of the new tileset, with offset tiles and overlays and different objects for walls and floors etc... In this post I want to talk a bit about how I make the textures, and what I've learned from the first (partially successful) generation of tilesets. Experiments with using different lighting for tiles and characters. If I wanted I could continue to make the game using the old style of tilesets, they're not that bad, but they just don't satisfy me. I know they could be much better and I've learned a lot in the last 2 years that I'd like to include in a revision of the tilesets. Some of the things I want to consider when making the new tilesets are: Don't make doorways "covered", the doorway area should be open to the sky, otherwise it's difficult to arrange your characters in a doorway, somewhere where combat is very likely to take place. In the MKI tilesets I made the door...

I've been working hard but only a few small improvements to show. First is a scene I'm going to use for the main menu: Still Life for game menu from Pickledtezcat on Sketchfab . And an update to some of the light and shadow mechanics for the game: I also worked on the map reveal, you can  see the sections of the map being revealed as the players move through the level. This revealing of the map is mirrored by the mini map, which only shows where you've already been. I had some concept ideas too; 1. multi turn spell casting. I'm going to come back to that later when I know how it's going to work. 2. Auto follow for team mates. That one's easier to do, and will probably be added soon. I found it rather tiring to move all the players around when there are no enemies nearby. I think though it'll turn off automatically when you get to a trap or combat situation.