Archived from the old blog. Original publish date: May 9, 2023

Hi Everyone,

Back again! I’ve got a fun one this time around with version 0.4.0.

First off, this project finally has an official title! I’m happy to announce…

Flask & Barrel!

Now, on to the new stuff!

Highlights 

Site Updates

I did some work recently to clean up this site. I tried to make it a bit more visually consistent, and hopefully make it a little easier to search for

Lighting and Rendering

The new lighting system caused quite the headache with this update, and it took a bulk of the work. I tried a lot of different ways of making the lighting more dynamic and realistic, but, as per usual, isometric is hard.

The core of it comes down to the fact that the engine “pretends” that the scene has depth, when in reality it is just fancy math being done on a 2D plane. I ended up creating an entirely new rendering system to be able to better talk with the GPU and use shaders more easily, and that’s allowed for some fun stuff.

 I think it could be better, but it was a great deal of work getting it here, so this is where it’s going to stay for now.

There is now a day night cycle, as seen above in super speed. To achieve this I take in a color gradient from a texture and I use that to define how the lighting of the scene should react.

You also might notice that things have shadows now! This was the source of much internal debate, but I ended up landing on simple drop shadows for objects that need them. Stuff like buildings I am not going to bother with unless I feel it becomes really unsightly down the road.

Art Tweaks

I came across an issue I wasn’t aware of until I looked at my game on a new monitor. The contrast was a bit off, and everything seemed a little washed out. I made some minor adjustments that should really help the colors look a lot closer to how I’ve been seeing them.

Ambiance

I’ve done some work making the world come alive a bit more. This includes some variations to textures, such as the trees with mushrooms, as well as several new mushrooms that you can encounter in the world.

Another big ambiance change is weather! Right now it really exists mostly as a framework for future work, but I’ve implemented sunny, rainy and foggy weather. Changing weather starts to slowly taper in/off the rain, and gradually change the day/night gradient to match.

Brewing Demo

Brewing got a bit of a rework, and I’m happy with the direction its going. Brewing now focuses around the Cauldron, which can combine 3 ingredients together. These ingredients can be raw, or processed through a few new processing stations. So far I just have a stove and a chopping station. The idea here is to combine a system like Plate Up, with a system like Breath of the Wild. You’ll process your ingredients to get more out of them and change their properties, and then combine them together in the Cauldron to see how these effects interact.

There’s clearly a lot of work to be done here, but this is the first real “demo” of brewing. Previous iterations were more a proof of concept for menu functionality than brewing. I won’t get too in-depth with it here as brewing is going to be the focus of v0.5.0.

Ambitions

I’m happy with brewing for the first time. A lot of my ideas fell flat when it came to actually playing with them. This is the first real playable demo I’ve had to really try it out, and it can be a lot of fun, but I’ll save all the details for next time!

I am going to focus on brewing for the next update, v0.5.0 and hopefully shoot for something playable in v0.7.0, whenever that ends up being. Also, Tears of the Kingdom is coming out this week, so you can blame any delays on that!

Thanks for reading,

Nick