Hi!

Today’s update is a bit different. There are (almost) no new features. I changed the behavior of the stones and I fixed some bugs. However, I also redid all of the game’s art using a color palette.

When I started with this project two years ago, I was completely new to pixel art. Since then, I learned a lot and I actually developed a platformer where I worked with a color palette before.

This project was about a candle that could catch different flames to obtain certain powers. It’s inspired by the Kirby series. Unfortunately, I got lost in a sea of endless ideas and my motivation for that platformer dwindled…

Anyway, I wanted to try out a color palette for this game as well. So after a quick mockup, I decided it’s probably worth it. (I hope it was…) So I redid all of the art using only about 40 colors.

The most involved part was of course redoing the characters. Here, I use many sprite sheets for hair, clothes, accessories etc. In my old version, I simply modified the modulate property of these sprite sheets in Godot. While this is an efficient approach, it’s not really recommended from a color theory perspective. This way, I basically just changed the lightness of colors. However, to get much nicer and more vibrant results, it’s recommended to also tinker with hue shifting and saturation.

My new approach of changing colors is to use a shader to swap between color palettes. This was relatively easy to implement since I could reuse most of my old infrastructure for changing colors of the sprite sheets.

Afterwards, it was time to replace all art using the color palette. It turned out that I had to modify 143 images in total but I finished all of it in one weekend! Also, it was quite fun to go over all art of this game. There were quite a few rough edges that I needed to fix. For instance, I improved the old boulders and the weird mushrooms in Denewood.

If you are curious about what this game looked before, check out the images in the previous updates. For now, I also leave v1.5.0 uploaded if you want to directly compare the two art styles.

Overall, I’m quite satisfied with the result now and I’m looking forward to creating new art with this color palette. Now, the game should look much more consistent and vibrant.

I hope you like the new look of the game!

Wishes from Denesta, Arytherias