It's not that hard. You can just use a texture as a color look-up table. Take something like the image below, convert it down to your palette, and then use the .rgb values of your unconverted color as texcoords to find something on the LUT.
It's not that hard. You can just use a texture as a color look-up table. Take something like the image below, convert it down to your palette, and then use the .rgb values of your unconverted color as texcoords to find something on the LUT.
Blue is ascending from left-to-right and then top-to-bottom, so you have to do a bit of modulus.
It's come a long way. I really like where it's at right now.This discussion of changing palettes at runtime using shaders is very relevant to my interests! I'm still torn between attempting this approach (which means learning about shaders, but is probably a cleaner way of doing it) or pre-baking the colours into textures made during the procgen stage (no overhead at all during gameplay, but could be fiddly and time-consuming when generating the world).
For now, I've replaced the sample colours with Endesga 32 (or rather, Weltall Zero did and I shamelessly appropriated it). However, I realised that the only way to make the doors (and stairs) large enough is to increase the size that each "block" in the room layout represents.
Originally this was 24x24, or 3x3 tiles:
I've had to adjust it to 32x32, or 4x4 tiles:
Aside from the door size, this has some advantages and disadvantages. It means the edges will need to be handled a bit differently for the upper and lower floors, so the routine for converting the room layout into a full-size room will be more complicated. However, it has the huge advantage that the multiple for the floor tiles is better, so the edge pattern looks the same all the way around.
Here it is without the lines:
I got feedback that the floor is a little boring because the material isn't clear, so I'll try at some point to add a bit of edge lighting/shading to them to make it look more like tiles. It also needs to look weathered/cracked sometimes, but I'm putting that way down the to-do list because I have a lot of other temp art to create.
I have a slight concern that the walls look a bit less even/regular now that I've adjusted the width and redrawn the lines, but I don't know how much of this is in my head...
This is such a fun design. I like these colors a lot better than the red and silver you were showing off before.Pretty happy with how my next racing character is turning out! Still need to figure out a name for this Ghost Knight.
Pretty happy with how my next racing character is turning out! Still need to figure out a name for this Ghost Knight.
You say that it's just a passion project, but is the goal to make money, or to use it as portfolio material for a job hunt or similar? If there's no other reason besides passion, the only thing I'd potentially worry about is the friendship between the team mates, depending on how you propose breaking things off. Or simply finish the game at your own pace and not worry about what comes next :) I don't think you'll lose much in terms of investment beyond time if you decide to finish the game, depending on how far along you are of course.
I finally started a project again after becoming father.
As I still don't have the time, focus and nerves to release another VR Project, I thought "Why don't you make that old idea of yours"
So far my time management comes along pretty well and it feels amazing doing games again. My brain is coming back!
Doesn't look like much for you guys, but I didn' expect to get this far in just a few days.
At first I am generating a tile grid in which every tile is sending linecasts from every side to check for neighbors
The game itself spawns meshes at the tile map I created before and marks every tile with its coordinates and if they re a "wall" (rather edqe) or "floor" tile.
Now its time for proper character movement
If it is a passion project and stuff is bugging you. Take a breather. When you are ready, just jump back on and continue.
Talk to your friends, maybe they feel the same way? :) You're gonna have to talk to them eventually anyway hehe. Seems to me that you don't operate on a time table, maybe you could work on something smaller to take a breather and reenergize? I'm in a similar situation to you, two friends and I are making a game we started as a weekend game jam, and we're edging ever closer to 2.5 years now. Sometimes it feels like we'll never be done, if nothing else due to new bugs appearing. We don't expect a single download or dollar from this, it's not the point but appreciated of course, but the amount of work put into the project can feel discouraging since it sometimes feels like we're treading water and not getting anywhere.
I think you make the wrong assumption about the audience, i.e. considering your
we're three friends making a small online multiplayer game in Unity, like a classbased cat and mouse chase game. We had a solid foundation over a game jam weekend but then we wanted to expand the scope and get proper online functionality and that took longer than we thought, even though we knew it was a bad idea from the start. We aren't working on it every day of course, it's down to once a week nowadays, give or take, and we're mostly down from three to two teammates now. I'd say we're near the finish line but I've said that for well over a year. Fact is, due to internal strife and feature creep, I said that I would drop out if we weren't ready for release by last August lol! I think we might have a beta out by this August though, it's been quite a while since I had anything major to do as the designer at least. Two and a half years sure is long and it's the longest project for me by far. I'm the only member who intends to use it as a portfolio piece though, so I won't abandon it now, and I think we got a great energy boost when I put down some hard deadlines (that we broke). I borderline lost a friend though due to the team's struggles last year.
I'll write two answers for you xD The short answer is, there's basically nothing left to do. The game doesn't randomly crash anymore from timeouts thanks to our new matchmaking asset, and the gameplay loop has been stable and complete for probably two of those two and a half years.
started to add a big floof to the game for the outside areas. Still working on the fluffiness.
We have started to reveal our next game: here's a first teaser gif :)
Game is almost complete and we are just ironing out the kinks at the moment.
Going to be posting more info in the upcoming weeks, I just wanted to share this first glimpse here, I'vent got that much time to be posting here lately but I'm lurking now and then :D
We have started to reveal our next game: few teaser gifs :)
Game is almost complete and we are just ironing out the kinks at the moment.
Going to be posting more info in the upcoming weeks, I just wanted to share this first glimpse here, I'vent got time to be post here lately but I'm lurking now and then :D
This discussion of changing palettes at runtime using shaders is very relevant to my interests! I'm still torn between attempting this approach (which means learning about shaders, but is probably a cleaner way of doing it) or pre-baking the colours into textures made during the procgen stage (no overhead at all during gameplay, but could be fiddly and time-consuming when generating the world).
For now, I've replaced the sample colours with Endesga 32 (or rather, Weltall Zero did and I shamelessly appropriated it). However, I realised that the only way to make the doors (and stairs) large enough is to increase the size that each "block" in the room layout represents.
Originally this was 24x24, or 3x3 tiles:
I've had to adjust it to 32x32, or 4x4 tiles:
Aside from the door size, this has some advantages and disadvantages. It means the edges will need to be handled a bit differently for the upper and lower floors, so the routine for converting the room layout into a full-size room will be more complicated. However, it has the huge advantage that the multiple for the floor tiles is better, so the edge pattern looks the same all the way around.
Here it is without the lines:
I got feedback that the floor is a little boring because the material isn't clear, so I'll try at some point to add a bit of edge lighting/shading to them to make it look more like tiles. It also needs to look weathered/cracked sometimes, but I'm putting that way down the to-do list because I have a lot of other temp art to create.
I have a slight concern that the walls look a bit less even/regular now that I've adjusted the width and redrawn the lines, but I don't know how much of this is in my head...
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Thanks, yes playtesting must be done. I thought itch might be a good place for it but maybe your approach is wiser. We're gonna let fellow colleagues at our jobs test it soon I hope, they've been bugging us about it for a long time ;) I'll need to check our file size but sending it to era would also be nice for starters. We have a huge gam dev community here thanks to the university we all went to so that's of course an untapped resource, especially via facebook. Got any other suggestions for finding testers?
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started to add a big floof to the game for the outside areas. Still working on the fluffiness.
We have started to reveal our next game: few teaser gifs :)
Game is almost complete and we are just ironing out the kinks at the moment.
Going to be posting more info in the upcoming weeks, I just wanted to share this first glimpse here, I'vent got time to be post here lately but I'm lurking now and then :D
Decided to make some (low quality) gifs, showing the game in motion as well as new implementations:
Things are still progressing. Unity Cloud Build almost automated for Steam. I work too slow for this world!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/679270/announcements/detail/1648761723385463207
Thanks for the tips!
I got what I want working, I used the standard toon shading look up texture method
but rather than apply the gradient shades over a color texture, I used a limited color gradient and just tied the light intensity directly to which position on the texture was used for the color applied to the pixel being worked on.
There's still if checks by nature, it's a color replacement shader as well as a palettization one.
I pass in a texture with the areas I want color replaced (I'm going for a pixel art look with low resolution rendering, so the lack of antialiasing on the texture is fine)
Then I put in which color ramps I want to use for the green area and the pink area respectively
And now I know that the shading on that specified area will have as many steps as horizontal pixels in the image I pass in for the palette, and that as the light gets more intense it will more towards the right of the image.
Doing so I can make it so shades don't have to actually follow light to dark, or stay the same color, and have more control.
Next up is going from a single directional scene light source to the aggregate of multiple lights affecting the pixel at once, then comes making outlines and possibly some kind of dithering.
