(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone! Sooo, small apology out of the way first - I only did any major work on one thing this week. You remember how last week, I mentioned I was doing some tinkering with programming ideas I've had, and that one of the things I tried might be usable in Crisis Point to upgrade our lighting, which I would try doing when I had time? Yeah well, turns out that time is now. I got too excited about the idea of a lighting engine upgrade and decided to dive straight into it the day after making that post. The bad news is that there were some issues in my original implementation, and the way Crisis Point's rendering worked was incompatible with the system, which meant that I had a lot of bugfixing to do and I had to rework CPE's rendering quite a bit. The GOOD news is.. well, just look at the pictures.

I'm still tweaking values, so it might look a bit different once the update comes out than it does here, but hopefully the images speak for themselves; it's far from the most impressive or complex lighting engine ever made, but it's a tremendous upgrade from our old lighting if you ask me. Even in the more subtle areas like the Deep Soil, I feel it adds a lot more to the atmosphere, and I hope you agree!

If you're at all interested in how the lighting works: I'll avoid getting too technical, but the old system was about as simple as you can get. After the rest of the game was drawn, I overlaid a dark, partially-transparent, slightly tinted rectangle over the screen, and then any sources of light would "cut out" parts of that rectangle to prevent those areas being covered up by the dark layer. The system certainly worked for making an area darker, but because the entire overlay is one single color overlaid on top of the game, the overall effect is kind of drab and monotone. It doesn't care what color the original pixel was, everything is darkened towards the same color. NOW, we use a relatively similar concept, except instead of just overlaying a dark rectangle and cutting parts out, I use a shader to multiply the colors of each individual pixel based on the colors I want the area's darkness to have - so for example, in the Catacombs, it emphasizes the blue and red while reducing the green, to give everything a dark purple tint. This creates a MUCH wider variety of colors on screen, since it creates the new color based on what the old color was, making every scene more vibrant and interesting - especially darker scenes, like the Catacombs.

So like I said before, that's all I really worked on this week (outside of small things like continuing to find an actress for the new NPC). Sorry if you were hoping for a bigger update, I just got excited about the idea of a lighting engine update and I had to work on it :' ) It's not quite done yet, I have a lot of tinkering I need to do to make sure EVERY area looks good, but even though it took more work than I hoped it would, I'm really happy with the way it came out, and I hope you will be too!

That's it for me this week, everybody! Thanks so much for supporting us, and for letting me indulge in a not-strictly-necessary-but-exciting-(at-least-for-me) update like this one. I'll do my best to make sure there's more to report on next week, and hopefully this little detour won't push the update back at all - I'll keep you in the loop on that one as we get further in the month. See you in next week's update!