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trying another #playdate idea: guy with a candle/lantern quite noisy, but it has soft shadows with correct penumbra behavior, and runs at a stable 30fps on the device!

a clip showing the penumbras more clearly - the shadow's edge is softer when standing very close to the shadowcasting corner, and gets sharper as the light gets farther away. it's a "real" area-light!

for some reason i can't post video replies in this thread anymore lol. maybe just a bug in the site, will try again later. here's a screenshot for now: normal mapping for floors, highlights for lit faces of walls, ambient light for the more relaxed scenes

making a map editor, partly to make it faster to set up rooms, but also so i can auto-generate these red sectors... sectors are always rectangles, so any two points inside the same sector are guaranteed to have line-of-sight to each other. this should allow a much faster raycasting strategy!

trying some ambient occlusion - i'm doing it in an unusuable bruteforce way for now, but i like how it looks enough that it feels like it'll be worthwhile to find a smarter way to do it

starting to work on a first enemy type (video contains a creepy-crawler)

fiddling with another type of creepy-crawler today

third type of bug: little roaches that get scared away by your lantern

kinda dry, but i've been making a custom language for dialogue/scenario authoring for the past few days. sorta like yarn spinner, where you can mix "coding-script" logic and "theater-script" dialogue. it's finally executing some code! video of this script running in the next post

started adding support for a moving camera - this is harder than usual in this game, because of the lighting system! getting more and more interested in making the whole game one continuous/seamless map, instead of doing room-transitions...

I think I would suggest scrolling the noise pattern with the map.

usually i'd agree - and i tried it, but unfortunately flickering a pixel on and off looks bad on the playdate. in this case with the blue noise, it seemed to artificially alter the contrast of the image whenever you were moving...so, can't do it!

went down a rabbit-hole thinking about how to get the ambient light level to change as you moved long distances, ended up with a baked lightmap

reached a fun milestone in scenario-authoring today!