Devtober Days 1-2

The progress made on the first day of October was not very interesting to look at. It was mostly backend data-handling code. The patterning system I had devised about six weeks ago and slowly implemented over that time in between other tasks (turns out, to add a subsystem, I need code for parsing the spreadsheet, getting the data into strongly-typed structs, using that data to apply to the shaders, and there’s additional data for which pattern outcome gets applied from which genome data, with corresponding code for rolling those outcomes and applying those to the shader as well. On top of that, all user interfaces needed to be updated to use the new methods!). On this day, I finished the last of these, fixing a couple of straggler bugs, and hooked everything up together.

The datapack is built with no more errors!

Today I decided I needed to do something more visual. That way, I don’t have to show yet another screenshot of console output messages.

I felt like it was time to start making my own nature painting brushes for Krita, partly because most existing packs would require me to make a new account on a website I haven’t used in almost a decade and do not care to visit anymore, but also because of the unique angle my game is from. Foliage stamps that save time for landscapes viewed from roughly human eye level are at the wrong angle for foliage viewed from completely above.

So, I spent a good amount of time reading over the documentation for the various brush engines. Figured out, to make something good for the pixel engine, I should do a B/W illustration of the plants I want to turn into a brush, with a transparent background. Then I can use the Gradient Map setting when making the brush, allowing it to be shaded between those two colors and save quite a bit of time when illustrating.

I made a test painting of a leaf.

Then made a brush and tested making piles of leaves for different seasons (as, in the temperate forest, piles of leaves surrounding tree bases would be a common sight)

(This isn’t just the brush, as I also added a subtle shadow layer to the leaves on lower layers to keep it from appearing too flat)

Tomorrow I’ll see if I can integrate these into my existing, rather empty temperate forest maps.

I made a double post because I wanted to give the status post some time to breathe, but my progress posts for the rest of the month should be on the same day up until the final one for which I will write a postmortem instead.