Gem Cutting | Patreon Weekly #228

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share some progress I’ve made to the various visuals in the new crystal caves quest region!

There’s also new Patreon Poll this week! This time around I’m curious to get your feedback on how tough and taxing the new caves quest is.

Visual Improvements

Firstly, the most important visuals in the quest are the ever-present crystal spikes. These spikes really help differentiate the area from other parts of the caves, and so I really wanted to nail the visuals for them. Things went through a few iterations from start to finish:

• First, we have the initial sprites that released with BETA-1.0, these are pretty much totally based on the sprites for some alchemy spells.
• In BETA-1.3 I made an initial step of darkening the colors, which helped the crystal better blend into the other caves terrain.
• I first experimented with changing up the shape, but this didn’t work so well. The blockier the crystals got, the more flat and grid-like they appeared.
• I went back to the spike shape, but added some variance, letting some of the spikes lean a bit left or right.
• I then added a 3rd color, which both made the crystals more detailed and let them have a brighter highlight without sticking out too much.
• Then I added some smaller crystal bits to try and make the crystals look less separate from one another. This added a bunch of visual noise though.
• I went through several ‘smaller crystal’ iterations and ultimately settled on some larger ones right next to the spike, and a couple smaller dots further out. This helps the crystals blend together a little bit visually, but is still clear from a gameplay perspective.

Overall I think this is a huge improvement, I’m really happy with how the crystals turned out:

I’ve also done some work on the spire and guardians, but the improvements have been less substantial:

The spire also benefits from having a third color, but there’s more that could be done here. There’s plenty of space for a more complex shape, and the larger size also makes the spire seem really flat without some shading.

Guardians have some new colors that are much closer to the other crystals, but still look far too much like other statues in the dungeon. I’d like to try and increase their size, and give them a different head shape to better differentiate them.

Lastly, wisps haven’t been changed at all, and I would really like to try and improve their glow effect, as well as improve how they look when on top of crystal terrain.

V2.2.0 is going to release on Wednesday or Thursday this week though, so there may not be time to make all the improvements I want. With the crystal terrain in a good place I’ve at least made some solid progress though, so if needed I may finish off some of this spritework in a patch.