Pneumagination Shader Changes

Hello, it has been a bit since the last Pneumagination progress! Not too much has happened but things are slowly going along.

The main thing has been waiting on gd_fastnoise2 to update for the GetEncodedNodeTree function. Originally the project didn’t run at all for C# bindings but it finally now boots in a custom Godot compile. I am not familiar enough with fastnoise2 though to contribute- so basically the entirety of this game’s release hinges on this thing getting that function included. If it never does I’m gonna have to revert all my noise generation functions back to the original FastNoise which will be VERY not fun, much more limiting, and much slower. I’m basically just holding off hoping I don’t have to do that.

Shaders & Lighting

Recently I have decided to finally go the opposite route in the look of the game. Instead of trying to get lots of bounced lighting, I’m just moving the whole game to a custom palleted cel-shading system.

There was some sort of voxel dev video I was watching where the person made a comment like “lighting isn’t everything”- and then later was watching lots of Sonic Mania gameplay and it just kinda hit me that I’m always constantly fighting the lighting engine for the look I want rather than just making the textures stand for themselves. So now there’s basically no lighting! Well there still is but its just single bounce stuff. There’s 3 palettes in the cel shader for each texture: fully lit, halftone, and pitch black. Most of the game you’re just gonna see lit and halftone. Once it hits night or you go underground though it will darken to that pitch black palette. This will have most colors be black- but some extremely bright ones I’ll have visible so the player can still get around.

With this I’m also changing the artstyle of the game to better reflect this. Originally I was going for the painterly aesthetic TF2 has for world textures, but now I’m going closer to the stylings of Mario 3, Kirby’s Adventure, and Sonic 3. A big focus on patterns and few colors. I am debating if I want to lean closer to Mario 3 and have lots of black details everywhere, but at the scale of the world and wanting to have entities give good contrast I think I’m gonna limit any black tones to player-placed blocks and entities. At the very least terrain textures won’t get this since they’ll take up most of the screen realestate. I may have trees and other stuff be the exception.

I’m not sure how I’ll change the style of the characters, I may just keep the painterly aesthetic. Characters are already also gonna be cel shaded- and have a black outline + dropshadow as always planned, so having smoother textures may better seperate them from the rest of the world- we’ll see. Right now its gonna be a lot of experimentation. I may revert main world textures over time to a softer look while still retaining the fancy patterns. It’ll depend on how everything meshes together.

Other Stuff

In other news I’ve started on the inventory! Everything is basically super mega broken so it’ll be a bit before that’s all up. I have to start planning it with the multiplayer mindset which has made it hard to work on it. As I wait on gd_fastnoise2 to fix I’m just kinda sporatic in whatever interests me- but its made it so even if that gets fixed, I can’t immediately release the build. I gotta finish inventory, re-add the tools, add a create world section to the menu, finish some draft of the new textures, and make sure world saving is somewhat functioning as last time I tried it it would crash a lot. Currently though it saves fine and I wonder if it was just a low memory thing.