Windows Lightbird | Casual Atmospheric Flyer

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Silvervale

Guest
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Enter the beautiful world of Lightbird, a peaceful atmospheric flyer that can be as soothing or stressful as you make it.

Download here: https://silvervalegames.itch.io/lightbird

Hey everyone, so I've been working on "Lightbird," for a while now, and it's finally completed. It's a simple game, so I spent a fair amount of time on the visuals, because I want to try and create very nice environments, and make this a very polished experience.

Any and all feedback is appreciated!

Trailer:

Day 25_2.png

Day 25.png
 
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S

Silvervale

Guest
That looks fantastic! What's your process for this amazing art style?
Thanks! Yeah, so basically I use Blender 3D to model up and animate everything in the game. Then also in Blender I set up colors, lighting, compositing, DOF, and some atmosphere effects.
Behind the Scenes_1.png
►Some rocks ready to be rendered in Blender

This is then rendered and brought into Gimp, where individual sprites and such are cropped and tweaked. Blender also renders out all the frames of animations if needed, which are also compiled in Gimp. Then export everything to GameMaker where they are combined with several "fog layers" and some shaders which tie everything together.

It's taken a fair amount of time and tweaking the settings to get the look I've been going for, (I used the same method to make Survival Chess, more or less) but I think this will be my signature style moving forward.
 
S

Silvervale

Guest
So since it's the last day of the month, that means #devtober is coming to a close. But that also means that the demo is now live! Go play it if you want, the demo is free! If you do play it, please let me know what you liked and didn't like with a comment. Thanks!

Download:
Lightbird Demo

DqPjgPaVsAASdOa.jpg large.jpg
 
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immortalx

Guest
This has such a nice mood! Visuals and music is top-notch and has huge potential.
I believe the background rocks should have less saturation and be less noticeable. I've felt a bit motion-sick after a couple of minutes, perhaps due to them being too blurry?
I've got a weird scaling issue when I maximized the screen. If you'd like I could send you a screenshot.
 
S

Silvervale

Guest
This has such a nice mood! Visuals and music is top-notch and has huge potential.
I believe the background rocks should have less saturation and be less noticeable. I've felt a bit motion-sick after a couple of minutes, perhaps due to them being too blurry?
I've got a weird scaling issue when I maximized the screen. If you'd like I could send you a screenshot.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! Yes, if you could send a screenshot I'd appreciate it.
 

Nehemek

Member
Alright, here are my thoughts:
  • For a game focusing on some nicely crafted graphics surely does the wing flapping animation looks wonky and with a low framerate.
  • It took me a while to figure out that the U shaped things weren't stealing my feathers but rather saving them so I didn't lose them when I crashed.
  • The movement for some reason doesn't makes it. It feels snappy and that didn't feel connected with the flight of a bird (perhaps it needs some momentum or acceleration).
 
S

Silvervale

Guest
Alright, here are my thoughts:
  • For a game focusing on some nicely crafted graphics surely does the wing flapping animation looks wonky and with a low framerate.
  • It took me a while to figure out that the U shaped things weren't stealing my feathers but rather saving them so I didn't lose them when I crashed.
  • The movement for some reason doesn't makes it. It feels snappy and that didn't feel connected with the flight of a bird (perhaps it needs some momentum or acceleration).
Thanks for trying it out! Yeah, animation is not my strong suit, and it does need some work. Maybe some more adjustments are needed to the tutorial as well.

As for the flight, are you talking about being able to turn too sharply, or an animation mismatch, or....?
 

Nehemek

Member
Thanks for trying it out! Yeah, animation is not my strong suit, and it does need some work. Maybe some more adjustments are needed to the tutorial as well.

As for the flight, are you talking about being able to turn too sharply, or an animation mismatch, or....?
Yeah, the sharp turn, for a reason feels dissonant with the "flight". Maybe it's just me.
 
S

Silvervale

Guest
I just completed and uploaded the first patch to the demo.
  • Updated the tutorial some
  • Fixed the screen scaling issue
  • Decreased the saturation of background elements
  • Added distant mountains to allow players eyes somewhere to rest
Now I'm working on the upper atmosphere!
Demo 2.png
 
S

Silvervale

Guest
I've added a new lighting method to the environment, which creates a nice false 3D effect on the rocks. Basically I just used surfaces that adds the rock's sprite, then subtracts it again at an offset. It turned out nice though!

Also, I made a new bird animation... which is not shown in this video...

 
S

Silvervale

Guest
So while play testing, I noticed a slight movement mismatch between the feathers and the players motion, which could definitely cause motion sickness. So I slowed down the room speed to check for other motion mismatches, and discovered that the whole room lagged behind the player ever so slightly, which was exaggerated with the different parallax layers. It was also massively exaggerated when the player makes sharp turns and zig-zags a lot, so much so that I made myself really motion-sick (which rarely happens). Even though the movement between the environment and the player happens in the same step, the player still leads by a small amount for whatever reason. But I did come up with a fix:

Basically before the objects moved liked this:
y += global.dy;​
where dy is the player's velocity.

Now I'm taking the derivative, and throwing it into the mix:
global.ddy = global.dy - global.last_dy;
y += global.dy - global.ddy;​
so ddy is acceleration.

It seems to have fixed the motion mis-match problem, and was thankfully an easy to implement fix too. So hopefully this will solve the motion sickness problem... And now I will go throw up.
 
S

Silvervale

Guest
Finally, the release is nigh! I'm currently running a closed beta test for the game, if anyone is interested in giving it a try let me know and I'll try to get you a download key.
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