Resonant Blade Devlog 29 Visual Improvements [ Dark Synth Citadel ]

Hey, everyone! I want to show you all some of the visual updates I’ve made to the first level in my game. The first level takes place on the Dark Synth Citadel, a floating base and the headquarters of the corrupt Artificial Intelligence, the Dark Synths. The first change was updating the color palette and lighting. I got rid of some of the point lights and focused on using colors to make things stand out more. I made the floor for this map much more saturated and provide more contrast with the character sprites.

I wanted to give the player a little more time to test out the movement and controls before being locked into a cutscene, so I added in a long platform before you watch Dorian get brutally disintegrated.

A lot of the visual changes after that were going back and replacing all of the particle systems with sprites. I think some of these visuals really detracted from the pixel art aesthetic (I'm no pixel art expert by any means, but I'm trying to get better at it). At the time, it was easier and faster for me to just throw in some particles to make things work, but now I want to go back and make the art style more cohesive.

For forcefields around enemies and treasure chests, I added in a script that generates sprites along the pixel grid. These little sprites are generated when the forcefields are hit. I also added a custom animation for when the treasure chest forcefields are disabled.

The background ships and background explosions were also changed from particles to sprites. Instead of just having shadows flying by to indicate ships flying overhead, I added ships in the foreground layer that fly by to make the battle seem a little more intense and immersive.

Ok, that’s it for this week’s devlog. Thanks for reading :)

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