I spent today celebrating my girlfriend's success in the world of academia. She received her PhD after 7 years of dedication and hard work... and it paid off! She got a job at a prestigious university in Virginia. So... after spending the majority of my life in the Rochester, NY region I'm going to leave my full-time job, pack my belongings and relocate to the beautiful city of Staunton, VA. This could mean great things for my life as an indie game developer. While I will be job searching in VA, at least for the time being, I'm going to have a lot more time to dedicate my games. TAG is getting close to completion, and although it will still be released as freeware I have bold plans for a future commercial project. Of course, a lot of my plans are based upon how well TAG is received by the public. I hope you all love it as much as I do.
Here's to a fresh start in Virginia!
On another note. I discovered how to do some more interesting 2d dynamic lighting effects in MMF2 and decided to revamp the entire game with this new knowledge. It took me about a week of work but the results were worth it. Here are some before and after shots. What do you think?
One last thing. Lately I have given into the evil power that is the twitter. If any of you use it and want to read inane babble and occasionally updates to TAG's progress: follow me! http://twitter.com/robit_studios
Congrats to your girlfriend, and hope the move works out for you both.
Don't really like the water effect, but the other two are neat - esp. the darkness and fog in the last pic.
Having said that, it always looks weird to me when you combine very retro pixelart with more modern alpha channel / shader effects.
I think the new lighting is an improvement but I agree with Sketchy that sometimes pixel art and alpha blended lighting/effects don't look right. The glow around the flames in the second screenshot look great though.
It might not be to your taste but I think it'd look good with a vignette over the screen. At least in those underground sections.
I get what you're both saying about the low-res pixel art with shader effects, etc. I tried not to overdo it though (in fact there are actually very few shader effects in the game, it's mostly alpha channel stuff).
The screen shots above were the most dramatic examples of the new lighting. Throughout most of the game I don't think most people will even notice the lighting stuff. I will definitely take another critical look at it though and make sure it's not over-done to the detriment of the pixel art.
That said: Nim, I'm not sure what you mean by a vignette - Could you provide an example of what that looks like? Comment edited by Klayman on 5/16/2011
Sometimes the effect is more subtle than others, but I think even a subtle one can have a large effect without the player realising it's there. Granted LBP is not a pixel art game but I remember having a vignette on one of my own games once.
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