Spooky Pooky #60 - Lighting and Logging

Lighting is fun. Logging is ... not so much.

Published on 08 Sep 2017 by Joe

Welcome to my weekly bi-annual devlog update. It's only been 7 months since the last update, so apologies for spamming.

I've actually got quite a bit done on Spooky Pooky. Not as much as I should have and clearly not in the devlogging department. Hopefully these things will get a little more regular now, as will the progress on the game as I'll have a little more time to get things done.

There's been a lot of behind-the-scenes work, otherwise known as this-is-why-people-don't-write-their-own-stuff-and-use-Unity. The good news though is that the game builds and runs nicely under both Windows and OSX (on the small pool of test machines available to me), so I'm going to try and be better at regularly testing under both from here on.

Here's a selection of stuff done ...

Let there be (nicer) light!

I added basic lighting a little way back which definitely improved the atmosphere. The downside was that unlit areas felt too dark and trying to up the ambient level washed it all out too much.

I've done a lot of tweaking on this and arrived at a couple of changes that helped quite a bit.

The first was to make the lighting look more stylised. Previously I was rendering the light using a simple smooth fall-off calculation based on the distance from the source. I've changed this to render in discrete bands with big intensity steps which feels more in-keeping with the low-resolution / limited colour palette look of the rest of the game. To make this more interesting I've also added some time-based noise perturbation to give things a dynamic smokey look. You can see the result below where some a light shaft is slanting down into the water.

The second change was more subtle and I could see it maybe splitting opion. Personally I like it and I'm the developer so it's in. When I compose the contents of the final lighting buffer with the scene I take high-intensity areas and render them additionally into the glow texture that's used for light-emitting sprites (I'm using multi-texture rendering so this is trivial and can be accomplished in the same shader that's doing the composition).

The resulting glow texture is already being composited after the lighting into the main scene using some blur, so pretty much for free I get some nice subtle glowing for bright pixels that are in direct light. You can (maybe) see this below:

The combination of these effects feel like they've lifted the look into something much more polished. I'm fully aware that some people may not like this sort of thing, especially in a game with a pixelly look, but you can't please everybody.

Workflow

When it comes to content generation having a fast workflow is pretty important. I'm using Tiled to build my rooms which helpfully lets you add arbitrary commands to it.

I've hooked up one such command to launch the game passing in the current room file and any selected object id. The game spots these and launches with the player located in the room being currently edited. If the selected object is an exit then the player enters the room through that point; otherwise the exit located is used.

There's the caveat that the room has to exist on the world map (another Tiled file), but that's not to much of a burden.

I may add some hot-reloading of map files so that I can keep the game running and it'll spot if the file changes, but since the game is pretty much instantaneous to load and run it'll do for the moment.

I've also finally sorted out the logging. Since I'm a lazy and poorly disciplined developer (at home - at work I'm a consumate professional), I've been chucking in random printf calls at various points.

This kind of nonsense always has a limited shelf-life, so I've knocked together some very basic logging with the usual info, warn, error, fatal type of logging calls. Currently stuff goes to stdout and a file; I still need to take a pass through the code to improve the actual content of what's logged.

It's obviously important to get this right - not specifically for debugging stuff during development, but more for the hypothetical time that'll come when other people start playing this - when it comes to bug reports you can never have enough information.

And the rest ...

Anyone still reading is obviously a game developer and so will already have trouble maintaining focus for longer than 5 minutes. Out of solidarity for you I'll break this rambling recap into two or three posts, with the next to arrive in a day or so.

To entice you, the next exciting installments will cover such topics as changing the state system to use mutating function pointers instead of enums, switching from SFML to SDL, and changes in development environment and build systems to ease cross-platform development.

Gripping stuff ...

Published on 08 Sep 2017 by Joe
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