Dillo

Very cool! Looks like you made the right call with 16 ppm in that style. The pixel art foundation still comes through nice and clear. :)

32 pixels per meter. I tried to maintain that pretty consistently for this kit. With these metrics, I could get a 4m run in a 128x128 atlas, and 4 variations of that in a 256x256. That way you can mix things up enough in 4m increments that it doesn't get overly repetitious.

Felt like trying some more scene-building with this WIP asset kit. I'm somewhat fixated on this particular color scheme atm, but I should try a cooler nighttime scene soon. #unity #gamedevelopment #indiedev #lowpoly

Every vertex is initialized to a default color, which is tunable. If there is no data saved for the vertex's position, it will use that instead. The default color is analogous to ambient environment color in normal lighting pipelines.

It's the latter. Whenever you apply vertex colors, the component iterates through each mesh vertex and looks up its color by position, then sets the array value at that index correspondingly. So the shader is agnostic to vertex positions - all it cares about is a single Vector4[].

My bad! I didn't realize I had my settings this way... If you try again it should work now. :p

Sure, feel free to send a DM!

The modular set used here is based on a study I did on the high-detail pixel art style used in Vagrant Story. If the atmosphere feels familiar, it is probably that. :)

Lastly, a quick flythrough of the test scene I used as a proving ground for the tool. It's built pretty ad hoc off of limited assets, so it's more just vibes than a believable environment, but it held up well enough as a test. #indiedev #gamedevelopment #unity

Closeup of the vertex color painting tool in action, to give a clearer sense of how it works. #indiedev #gamedevelopment #unity

You could think of it as using two Photoshop-like "layers" - a base color which you set across the scene, and a raw vertex color set by the paint tool. The final vertex color lerps between the two based on the alpha of the latter.

The vertex data is saved by (approximate) position relative to the mesh origin, rather than vert index, so it's resilient to re-exporting after changes. This was pretty important, since it would be unusable long-term if the vert color data broke whenever you re-exported.

I wanted to support a modular workflow, but this is difficult for vertex colors since those are normally set directly in the mesh. Instead, I wrote a component that sets a MaterialPropertyBlock on the mesh, which is populated with an array of vertex colors. The shader then references the array.

Been working on a Unity tool for painting lighting directly into the scene using vertex colors. Much time was spent on Radiant Sword doing hand-painted lighting in Photoshop. This workflow would hopefully be more efficient! (Implementation details to follow...) #indiedev #gamedevelopment #unity

Environment for a recurring event scene. I really like dark environments. #indiedev #gamedevelopment #jrpg #srpg

A diagram I made a while back of the phases of art treatment in Radiant Sword's levels. Blockout & UVs > base textures > in-texture lighting > engine lighting. #indiedev #gamedevelopment #srpg #jrpg

Thank you for the kind words! Unfortunately, the game is on pause right now, as I wasn't able to find other developers to help see it through. But I would love to return to it someday, and I'll continue to post more legacy screenshots from its development!

Thank you! That style is very near and dear to my heart, so they're a lot of fun to do.

More of the FFT-style sprite sheets. I went back and forth on calling this one Holy Sage or just plain old Cleric. #pixelart #indiedev #srpg #jrpg

More scene/environment art from Radiant Sword. Getting 2D/3D elements to mix nicely can be a challenge, but I just really like the style. #jrpg #pixelart #indiedev #gamedevelopment

And, here's what it looked like in action, after texturing was done & lighting was applied. #indiedev #gamedevelopment #srpg #jrpg #pixelart

Here's a grab bag of some of the texture atlases & tiling kits used in level construction for Radiant Sword. I tried to keep a constant texture density of 20 pixels per tile. #pixelart #indedev #gamdevelopment #jrpg

Cutaway for one of the environments from Radiant Sword. Doing the lighting for this scene was quite fun. #indiedev #gamedevelopment #srpg #jrpg

Sprite sheet I made for the Fighter, one of the four starter classes in Radiant Sword. I broke out the arms so that I could composite different FFT-style animations easily, which was a huge time-saver. #pixelart #jrpg #indiedev #gamedevelopment

Sample spell effect from the on-hold Radiant Sword for one of the later-game fire spells. I really enjoy making these! #indiedev #jrpg #gamedevelopment

Here's a collection of portraits I did for the currently on-hold TRPG project Radiant Sword. For these, I tried to recreate the style of Kunihiko Tanaka's portraiture from Xenogears. #pixelart #gamedevelopment #indiedev #jrpg