So a few months back I quick pixel art doodle and decided to see if I could translate it into a working game in Gamemaker Studio.

Flash forward a few months of unemployment and I'm happy to announce that I just dropped the first build on Itch and I'd love to see what you all think.

A big driver of this project was wanting to find a different way to do lighting in pixel art games. While overlays of varying opacities are really easy to implement you can sometimes lose things at the edges. Details get muddled and you're restricted by just making it darker or lighter.

With Corvus, I build a layering system where objects would project different versions of their sprites onto foreground layers. This lets me effectively build two monotone palettes for background/midground objects and you see a different one based on where they sit in the lighting.

I think it turned out pretty well in the end and I learned a lot over the project.