Week 40 - Gamma correction, new website and Kongregate news - Blackreef Pirates

Ladies and Gentlemen, here's the 40th week update! Today I'm going to talk about Gamma correction, the new website and Kongregate.

Whaat? Where is the game?!

Don't worry, the game is progressing well, Marco is creating a whole new section of the city and I'm working on some new gameplay feature related to Indoor scenes. Also, the story start to have some interesting twists, but I still can't talk about the details ;-)

Gamma correction

In a perfect world every monitor have always the right contrast and colors. In a perfect world gamma correction makes no sense. But we live in a world where every monitor is slightly or completely different from the "standard" because of user settings or cheap hardware.

We want to create a game that looks great everywhere, so we need a way to compensate all these monitor differences in lighting. One of the solutions is to provide the user with a slider to correct the gamma and then correct the image with a post-process filter.

Here a simple test with 3 different gamma settings:

Gamma correction test (click to zoom)

New website

Avast!! There's a new dedicated website at www.blackreefpirates.com

Currently is just a placeholder page with some links but soon we plan to add all the game related media and a community forum to it.

Kongregate

If you love flash games on the web probably you already know Kongregate, it's a place to find lots of browser based games with a very big community of players.Recently they also the publishing of Unity3d games in their portal...It's a great opportunity for small developers like us to grab a little exposure, so we published our little "Training arena" alpha on it.

The results? The alpha got 1000 (and more) plays in just a few days. I'm sure we can do more with the next alpha but, in the meanwhile, please support us!Hint: Give us a 5 star rating to gain more visibility!

That's all for this update, see you next week with a new "Art asset overview" video.