inkspinnr - Tumblr blog

[inkspinnr]

Last week I made a little jam game for Minijam 150, the theme was magic and the limitation was 'light is the way.' A pretty abstract limitation for sure ahahaha. We got 1st place! My goal was to play with my toolkit and make something small and complete, from start to finish. Across the projects I've worked on I have pretty good libraries for handling stuff like NPCs, conversations, interactable elements etc. that I wanted to play with.

Scoping out an RPG in 3 days is fun! We started with an outline for the story, magical girl beats up aliens. Combat system came next, that's the gameplay part of the game. You get 3 moves, that cover different areas and solve different problems, which makes the fights into super basic flow charts the player can solve. With 3 moves, we knew we wanted 3 combats and a boss, let's you make a super easy level up system where you upgrade a move after each fight, then fight the boss with your skills. Exploration is rewarded with little health upgrades that give combats a larger margin of error, a neat little package! The game also gave me a great space to work with my new lighting tools and experiment with some practical uses of the color lookup table. On the html build of a love2d project, canvases get compressed and lose color accuracy. But with a color lookup table, I can use a shader to cheat in the proper colors, pretty cool! My favorite part was modding in a secret boss after the jam though, spending a couple laid back days post-jam playing with the legos I made! A harder more complex boss than you should probably put in a jam game, but I had fun ahahaha

[inkspinnr]

Been a while since I've done some character animations, love these things

[inkspinnr]

Been playing with Devil Daggers' modding tools. Made me realize how cool color lookup tables are, and that I could definitely figure out how to do it lmao

Building the actual shader for the color lookup table was really easy, basically reading the colors of the pixels as coordinates on a gradient image which is cool stuff. You can apply lighting by cross referencing the color of the pixel (x coordinate) against another lighting layer (y coordinate).

The HARD part was mathing the shadows ahahaha, first I simplify the map into lines. You have to remove every shared face of the tiles, so there are no lines in the middle, don't need those. Then you combine what's left around the edges, simple enough! Then using the new tile edges I generated, I project polygons away from the light source to clip out the light where the shadows are. I had to learn some real math, (paste some formulas from Wikipedia) to get the point of intersection of the projected lines to get the polygons right. I pin the corners of the polygon to the edges of the light texture, which looks really cool when you visualize it!

[inkspinnr]

Dimwood was originally made as an entry to 1-bit jam, back in august. Since then, we've had a blast updating and polishing the thing, more than tripling the amount of cards, added entire new mechanics, unlocks, enemies, starting decks, and a whole 20 levels of ascension difficulty to overcome! Putting the versions next to each other is crazy, how much everything is the same while everything has changed.

[inkspinnr]

One of the best parts of making games gotta be modding stupid stuff into your games when you're bored

[inkspinnr]

Somebody stop him