Hey everybody, how’s it going?
One of my main aims for getting a nice look to #Glow was to have the ability have different colour glows. I feel it’s really needed to avoid the game looking too stark and to add some overall eye candy to the experience. The way I’ve been generating the glow affect was inspired by a tutorial by Zack Bell about lighting affects using surfaces. This technique is great and has given me a really nice way to create the glow effect I was after.
However, as I started trying to add colour I started experiencing some strange issues. Due to the way surfaces deal with blending colours and alpha values I could never quite get the look I was after. The colours never displayed that brightness I was after for a coloured light, it was either big hole of colour without the blending effect.
The closest I could get had a slightly more washed out effect, in the fact that it dumbed down the image behind a little bit too much. It didn’t really have the crispness I was after.
Anyway to cut a long story short I had one of those eureka moments this morning when a lot of different researching culminated into a solution that did exactly what I wanted! It was such an amazing feeling to finally see those lovely bright multi-coloured lights on my laptop screen! It’s moments like these that really make me love indie dev. It turns out that I was trying to add the colour by using a draw effect on the surface which was already displaying the white glow. The trick was to instead draw a sprite over the glow with a desired colour and transparency. Kind of like putting a coloured filter over a white light.
I don’t think it’s a particularly difficult to have over come, but I’m still very new to indie dev and GameMaker Studio in particular, so it was a little win for me.
I’m thinking about writing a tutorial to describe this in more detail to help anyone else who may want to create a similar effect. All the info is already out there but I think if I consolidated it into one post it may prove quite useful.
Thanks
Stav