Winter’s Creeping Greetings

Good tidings! 😁 I hope you’re all well and have a great holiday period, here’s a little look at the mountain stages.. I’ll probably be quiet on the game-making front until after new year but follow me over on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/mfdawes for general updates.

Oh, and I set up a Facebook group specifically for CMO games.. (so now there’s one for the comics and one for the games) they have potentially pretty different audiences..

I was foolishly trying to finish the snowy stage in time for Christmas – to release a demo – but it’s not going to be possible, (I should have started the process much earlier, it only occurred to me when everyone else seemed to be releasing Christmas games/demos, haha!) – BUT no reason I can’t show you some of it, as it’s pretty fun!

The technical side of what’s going on in the background here is probably more complex than anything else I’ve done yet.. first I hand animated all the snowflakes (uuugh), running the parallax clouds below them, then using the 3 reserve parallax colours and their half-bright partners in the tileset to make ice transparency and multiple copper gradients of different darkness..

This shows the snow (pure white) the translucent white (which I trick into appearing by using the pink reserve colour) as well as the shadow and “pure” gradient.

The ice caves are visually the most happy I’ve been with an area. If I get the music right it should be dripping atmosphere!

Heres a small section of the map to illustrate how weird it looks in Tiled (the map editor) and give an impression of how working with the copper reserve colours looks.. I’ve picked vertical dithering in places as i love how that looks on CRTs, and even on a crisp display its less distracting than 1/1 dithering in some circumstances!

A lot of the behaviour is still a bit buggy in this video, but it’s almost done now. The penguins are my favourite, and there are at least 2 more enemy types on this level for you to meet, when it’s time!

Speak soon,

Mixel

1 thought on “Winter’s Creeping Greetings”

  1. Hi,
    only leave a comment here, to let you know, that it looks like,
    that you get good forward with the game developing.
    Best Regards
    Jakob

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