Happy (Early) Halloween! (Patreon)

Many spooky and festive returns everybody, hope your time has been filled with the appropriate kind of horror for the season; I've just gotten through a movie night of Nicholas Cage madness with The Wicker Man and Vampire's Kiss, which are indisputably some of the scariest movies in modern cinema, and am now back in my own darkened sanctuary working away.

Tile Sets have been a large part of the workload thus far, along with various objects like pickups, treasure, basic scenery etc etc. along with a new thing we're trying out for this new game, a proper lighting engine! Vero's very excited by the possibilities, and to the extent that I understand these things it sounds amazing thus far; what it means for me is learning about/making 'normal maps' and 'material maps' and the like. Yes, that's right, we've entered the latter part of the 90s now in terms of progress; look forward to a Quake level entry at some point, I guess :P 

If you're unfamiliar with what normal maps are, I won't bore you with an in-depth explanation (because I'll probably get it wrong) but here's what I have to do, essentially:

This here's the textures, and a small preview of one of the levels too I suppose, aaand:

This is a normal map; it essentially tells the lighting engine how much something should light up, to give the impression of depth... I think. I'm sure there's a few people shaking their heads currently but hey, I'm learning! 

While I'm doing that and that trailer Vero's working on Predation, getting the AI all fancy and doing their code thing; speaking of which a certain purple shirted adversary now has a consistent tail on one of the animations (I'm calling it a running joke to excuse my consistent idiocy) so there'll be some nice fixes along with new stuff when we can get some updates to you!

Right, back to the pixel mines for me; stay safe, watch out for repetitive strain injury, and we hope to have something a little more showoff-y for you in good time!

-Sephra