Cutscene Fixes and Lighting Update
Before I dive into the lighting fixes I attempted, there’s a quick update on some mechanics to cover.
First, I fixed a bug in the cutscene dialogues. Cutscenes are now fully functional and I can block the story out at crucial moments in the so-far accessible game world. This is very useful for actually testing the game-feel! The cutscenes don’t look great yet, however, because the cutscene character movement is very basic.
Secondly, the player can now die by ghost baby crying and will respawn at the previously saved hearth. They’ll return to their saved HP and lamp oil amount. This is very very basic saving that I will have to completely overhaul using actual DS_maps.
And thirdly, I have used the now functional cutscenes to fully block out the very short prologue area. That means there is now an area in the game where the story progresses completely. The player has to complete their task before they can move on, with cutscenes and appropriately changed dialogue descriptions. I can also block the player from leaving certain areas with cutscenes.
Now, for the lighting updates! (semi-succesful)
The first update is that I have enabled a basic shader for the yard, which now paints it as night time. I’ve not fully optimized the colour yet, but the atmosphere is already a lot spookier! I can finetune this post-processing shader later on to hopefully get an even better atmosphere.
Secondly, I have now updated my light-cutouts to automatically create a coloured glow as well. This is now on top of all the other layers, where it’s supposed to be. No more furniture clipping infront of the light!
Whilst this doesn’t look awful and makes the fires a lot nicer, I think it’s very much not ideal.
For those of you with some interest in this from a technical standpoint: The sprite lights are simply created with an “add” blendmode, which changes the colours below nicely but ruins a lot of the contrast. It’s very overbearing light.
My hope was to create an overlay-type shader that would apply post-processing effects ONLY to wear the light-sprites are placed and created. Everything else should remain untouched and darkened out by the basic light-renderer. This is my black surface, through which i cut holes for my basic light blocking.
However, I’m not sure I can apply post-processing to specific sprites, and I am still very new to shaders. Needless to say that whilst I think the concept is possible, I am not at all sure how to accomplish it right now. So for now, this compromise-lighting will do!
