The Making of the MVS prototype

The creation of Malnourised Void Simulator was a pretty interesting experience for me and the response to the prototype was more positive than I expected so I thought I ought to write about it a little.

I'll start with the art process I was working on because it's pretty funny. I was planning on having simple 3 frame animations each with 8 rotations all hand drawn. I started with some quick test drawings of the main character. I cut out little uniform papers to draw each frame on. I made the forward facing idle frame and to quickly iterate on it I wanted to use a light table to trace over this original drawing. But I don't have a light table so instead I used an empty glass tank with a light inside instead. With this I only ended up making frames for the 4 cardinal directions with no animation due to lack of time. 

Digitizing the images and removing the background was also a whole ordeal. I suspect if one has a professional image editor it would be very simple but I do not. So in the end I settled on this process: Take a picture of the frame with the flattest lighting possible, open the image in paint.net, use the magic wand tool to select all the paper colored pixels, delete them and then use AA's Assistant to soften the edges of the image.

The whole gimmick of the game of the player creating transparency in the window is one of the favorite things I've bodged together. There is a custom class named "voidsprite" that takes an image and creates a transparent silhouette in the screen. It does this by creating a separate sprite it controls with a remote transform as a child of a black color rect in a separate viewport. The color rect has a shader on it that inverts the alpha of all the pixels. To get this inverted image to use I had to create another viewport with a texture rect in it that uses the last viewport as a texture. To get this mask to create transparency I had to make all the spites in the game a child of a texture rect with the second viewport as its texture and the clip children setting set to clip children. And of course for any of this to work you have to enable transparent windows but that's a very easy thing that's in the Godot settings. So basically this system draws two screens before the main one, and everything has to be a child of a texture rect using the second viewport as a texture with clipping on.

Anyway that's probably all the silly things in my game, hope you enjoyed my ramblings about them.