Although we work full time gigs, my brother and I have been spending every ounce of free time we have to make Light Knight as good as we possibly can. We are closing in on how we want the game to look and feel visually and that means we are also getting incredibly close to a public demo.
Before:
Previously our focus was on game mechanics and ironing out the base for our lighting system. We had some re-usable terrain materials and some enemy types and that was about it. We wanted the light to work as a "true" light and actually cast shadows on the corners of platforms. This build included what essentially boiled down to two layers; a mid-ground and a background.
Now:
It's fairly obvious at first glance to say that we have been really busy. Not only did we add a story mode to the game with randomized rooms, and a VS mode that is kind of like Nidhogg on steroids; we also beefed up wave mode with considerably more stuff to interact with tons of visual changes. There are now three layers of lighting which produce effects on the foreground, mid-ground, and background layers. We added tracking and constrained zoom to the camera to allow us to get some basic parallaxing with the background and foreground elements. We added some additional colors that help with more of the tech style vibe. One of my favorite changes is using a computed shader to create fog trails that pour out of the vents in the foreground.
I could keep talking about these updates all day but we are genuinely curious about what you guys thing of the implementation so far. Our end goal with this game is create an experience that we hoped for when buying or renting games when we were younger. We would make a decision on which game we wanted based on the box art, and commonly felt duped when starting it up and realizing that the game itself looked nothing like that artwork. In creating Light Knight, we are trying to match the original illustration style as closely as possible and maxing out modern game engines to create an incredibly rich 2-D experience.
Please feel free to share what you think!
