stencilbits

Visual experiments

Added 2018-06-29 18:35:32 +0000 UTC

One thing I have been experimenting with for a some time now is how to support certain improved visual effects in Ren'Py (the engine Offcuts uses). Ren'Py is a great engine, but making dynamic or otherwise custom effects has never been easy. So, I have been working on a custom library that can support all kinds of interesting visual effects. For example basic skeletal deformation animation, image distortion and now simple deferred shading. The demo video shows some basic functionality, but you can also check other, older videos on that YouTube channel if this interests you. The project is also open source, so anyone interested can take a look inside or use it in their own Ren'Py game. The project is available at https://github.com/bitsawer/renpy-shader

TL;DR - What does it actually do? Well, instead of drawing or pre-rendering huge amount of different images for certain possible combinations (day, night, rain, dusk, expressions like smile/frown etc.) it is now possible to dynamically change lightning, animate sprites in more complex or expressive ways and do other cool visual effects. Visual novels are - like it says on the tin - a visual medium. Updating Offcuts to support all these nice new things is not currently a top priority, but it's certainly something I'm keeping in mind especially if I update the sprite "paper-dolls" at some point in the future. I'm constantly trying to speed up and optimize my graphics production workflow, so automating this image generation might be possible.