Hey #PitchYaGame people 👋 Here is my game

🛡️G l o o m G a t e⚔️

It's a pocket-sized, 1-bit action RPG/Dungeon Crawler exclusively for @play.date 💛
It has reaction based fights, a node based overworld and of course Souls-Like elements 😏

I hope you like it 🥰

The environments are set up similarly, but the values are more in a grayish dithered area. Plus some fog, to fade out distant objects. All of that leaves enough room for enemies to stand out. The camera rotates around the axis on which the enemies stand, to sell a somewhat convincing 3D illusion🏰

The last step for the characters are the shadows. I render the character a second time, but overwrite the shader to do just two things:
Render every pixel black and move every vertex on y=0. That way I have an animated drop shadow, independent of the light's position💡

To make them stick out a little bit more in game, there is a black outline, which gets rendered behind everything else. That way, white lines of the background get broken up, when they cross the characters. Makes them more readable👌

To make the characters more readable, I apply a white outline to them, that acts also a bit like an edge highlighting. That way you can recognize contours, even if that part is completely black🌚

The next big step is to change the render pipeline, so it outputs an image, that runs through a custom shader, to give it this 1-bit look. Super easy to set up in URP in Unity😊

Here is an overview of how I’ve set up the Art-Pipeline for Gloom Gate 👀

The Characters and the Environment are pre-rendered. I use Unity for that step. Each Character has its own Timeline, which plays all animations and handles transitions if needed.
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#1bit #pixelart #playdate #gamedev

This is how battles look like in
🛡️G l o o m G a t e⚔️

#indiegame #playdate #1bit #gamedev

When I talk about game dev and someone mentions AI