Hi everyone!
I’ve been tinkering away on Godot since November 2023; and I thought I should start getting involved with the community a bit.
Here’s my little passion project:
[What is PiN?]
A hand-drawn 2D action platformer with light combat.
Run through each level, collect medals and restore peace to each biome by defeating the ruling Daemon.
Currently, I’m working on it solo (definitely not for the entire thing).
[Features]
-Single Player campaign
-Core levels, challenge levels, special levels and boss levels. Core levels move the story beat forward. Challenge levels will test you based on what mechanics you’ve learned so far. Special levels are one-off, unique levels with different gameplay mechanics. Boss levels… I mean…
-Time trials with Ghosts (upload your own level’s race ghost and download others’ to beat them)
-Player progression system - Your combos, scores, medals collected and levels completed net you XP. Gain enough XP to earn “tags”. Tags are perks that you can equip (one max) to alter your gameplay. (Think spare health orb in a pinch, float while falling, prevent sliding while wall-sliding, temporary speed-boost)
The art is gorgeous, but i’m worried about visual clarity.. while i thoroughly loved how everything looked, foreground, background, and even characters and items seemed to blend. you might need some more lighting or something to distinguish them from the background.
edit: to clarify, everything’s there if you look closely, but eh lines between them are a bit unclear.
Thanks a lot ComicallyUnfunny, really appreciate your honest feedback here.
Maybe I could add outlines to characters which turn on if there’s too much background noise behind them? Same with the items. That could at least help with reading the screen a bit better.
I have optional lights on the characters too, which I could switch on. Although for this particular level, I’m trying to find a balance between visibility and a convincing sunset behind everyone. It’s a bit tricky but I’ll definitely keep working on it.
I totally see what you’re saying. As a very cartoony 2D game dev, I have the option of adding nice outlines to everything, but of course, your style doesn’t fit that.
I’ll see if i can find a good example of something that is clear to reccomend.
edit: maybe some small outlines, if you think it would fit.
If the background is a sunset, couldn’t you darken the foreground and sprites (silhouettes, basically) to improve visual clarity? (Would coding that be difficult? I am not sure…)
Edit 2: I just realized that you’ve already done that in some of your images…
Yeah definitely. and it’s not too hard to do. I just darken the canvas modulate node and it darkens everything. In some of the screenshots you can see, it works really well. But in other areas, it might hide enemies and items you need to keep an eye on. So I’m starting to lean into having an outline atm
I like that, but your little guy PiN isn’t standing out enough. make the fog affect him a bit less while maybe putting some shine behind him and that should be good, i think.
Notice how Rayman stays orange even in the green background. He also pops nicely because of his body color. PiN will pop well because blue stands out well against orange, but the heavy sunset effect is making him feel like part of the background.
