Hello again, everyone! ACTION GAME MAKER producer Morino here!
We’re well into the new year now, and it’s now the year in which ACTION GAME MAKER will be released!
For this seventh producer letter – and first of the year – I’d like to discuss the big changes to we’ve made to lighting and shadows over Pixel Game Maker MV.
Last year, we post this short video to our social media, and it was made fully in ACTION GAME MAKER and is all gameplay!
So let’s take a look into how it was made.
ACTION GAME MAKER supports PointLight2D and DirectionalLight2D system from Godot for use with 2D scenes.
I’ll explain both in a bit more detail as follows!
PointLight2D
PointLight2Ds are a small light designed to be used for things like torches, room lights, and other such limited forms of area lighting. The Holiday project used them for things like the light from inside the igloo and the S in Holidays.
Attributes light strength, size, and color are configurable, and they can also be controlled via our visual scripting system or in animations. So it should be possible to create a lot of dynamic lighting effects!
Additionally, you can texture them and thus create all kinds of appearances: from basic round lights to flashlights, or even laser like effects as possible.
Using a combination of different settings, we created this particular laser-like effect you see below. However, lighting does have an impact on performance that is quite heavy, so keep that in mind when designing the look of your game! If performance is still a concern for your game, remember that classic tricks like using masks, specially prepared tiles. or having shaded and lit versions of sprites can be used without the impact of using dynamic lighting and are still perfectly valid options.
Light & Shadow
As most of you probably noticed, in addition to generating light, objects that enter the light will also cast dynamically generated shadows. With ACTION GAME MAKER, now all objects and tiles placed via the auto-tile function can also have an Occluder volume assigned. This volume is the same size of the collision box by default. This is what is used to calculate the shadow when the object is under a light, and no additional settings are required to see those shadows. However, this is a performance cost, so keep that in mind when performing optimization of your game – or if you simply need to stop an object from casting a shadow for other reasons!
DirectionalLight2D
DirectionalLight2D-type lights are used for things like sunlight that affect a whole scene. They’re very powerful, and can distort the whole scene if made too bright. This means these lights will affect color perception of the scene.
For example, using a red light can help create a twilight feel, while a blue-white light evokes a sense of a moonlit night.
And again, these lights can be controlled via visual script or animations, with all the expressiveness that this enables. This makes dynamic time of day changes with a single tileset a reality.
Lighting is just one of many advanced functions that ACTION GAME MAKER incorporates from Godot. Between lighting, shaders, and particles, it is possible to make more expressive game worlds that reflect the beauty and aesthetics of the world you want to build! Here’s our forest sample with red fog and some ember-like particles.
Now our forest has a much more hellish feel to it! This might be a bit overkill (we’ll need to check performance), but it really shows what is possible!
We hope you can understand now how much more expressive ACTION GAME MAKER will allow you to be over our previous tool! With that said, even if you struggle with understanding the visual differences, we hope your takeaway from this letter is that it’s possible to make visually powerful and interesting games.
And that’s all for this producer letter! As usual, our next letter will be in February. With RPG Maker Festival 2025 also being in February, perhaps we should release some additional information for ACTION GAME MAKER too...
See you all next month!