For this next update I wanted to mention an issue I was having in Unreal. I had started with the Paper2D project template, but when it came to implementing the tile map I created I thought it might be easier to start with a blank slate, so I created a new level and started pulling my assets in. After playtesting a few times, I noticed something off about the colors:
The left side of the image shows what the art assets looked like when running the game and playing in a new editor window. The right shows the source art assets in Pyxel Edit. Something was happening behind the scenes to blow out the colors. Also, though you can't see it in the above image, it looked like there was a slight vignette effect being applied. The assets were supposedly using an unlit material, so they should look exactly the way they do in Pyxel Edit.
It took me a loooong time, filled with googling and asking the Seattle Indies community for help, but I was finally able to figure out what was going on. Turns out that Unreal, by default, tends to apply some color correction and effects to your game. In order to have no effects applied to the visual output, I essentially had to apply a post-process handler that negated the effects of the post-processing being applied by Unreal.
And, in my opinion, here's the most bonkers part:
You can see, above, that when the vignette effect is supposedly turned "off", there is still a vignette being applied. In order to entirely get rid of the vignette, I have to turn it "on" in the post-processer, and set the value to 0.
WHAT.
Anyway, that was frustrating, and still seems strange to me, but I'm glad it got figured out and now the colors are looking relatively close to the way they were intended (below, left shows playing in-editor, right shows assets in Pyxel Edit):
After getting nitpicky with the post-processing, I continued filling out the tilemap and eventually got something that resembled a playable level:
I then continued to work on fleshing out the environment, including adding some moving platforms to slightly increase the challenge of traversing the level. I also added more purpose into the game: stars! The original Starfall was about how the stars had fallen, and it was up to you to go around collecting them and returning them back to the sky. So I made some star sprites that would bob and glow gently to get your attention and created a HUD widget that would show the amount of stars you'd collected vs. total number of stars in the level:
More updates coming soon!