After switching to the ink look, everything started to blend together. Platforms, walls and objects all ended up in the same flat dots, only the outlines told them apart. This time I worked on making the world readable again without adding detail to the models.

What’s new

• Surfaces you can shift gravity onto are now drawn with diagonal lines instead of dots. You can see at a glance where you can go. Floors get sparse lines, walls regular ones and undersides are cross-hatched.
• Floors are lighter and undersides darker, depending on which way gravity points. After a shift, the shading flips with you.
• Edges you can stand on, like platform rims, get a thicker line, so it’s easier to judge where a jump ends.
• Objects in front get a thin white gap around their outline, so overlapping platforms don’t merge into one shape.
• Fixed big round halos that showed up around lights and when looking down into the void.

The nice part is that the drawing style now carries gameplay information, the lines tell you what you can use.

Today I tried simplifying the graphics while still keeping the game visually interesting.

Since I’m a solo developer, I want to simplify some aspects of the game so I can develop it faster and focus more on the gameplay and atmosphere.

What I tried

• The whole world is now drawn in black and white ink, like a manga page: black outlines, dotted screentone for shadows, solid black for the deepest ones.
• Lines are heavy up close and turn thin and dotted in the distance, so depth still reads.
• Fog is a soft haze of dots, stepping back into near, middle and far layers. Far structures fade into it but never disappear.
• Look down into the void and the world sinks into black, with whatever’s below still drawn in white lines. It flips with every gravity shift.
• Light shafts, ink dust in the air, speed lines when you go fast, and a negative shockwave on every gravity shift.
• The old look is still there, one console command away.

I think this approach could work, but I also feel like it could be pushed into something more interesting.

I’m not completely sure yet.

This one was mostly about crouching and sliding.

What’s new

• Crouching no longer slows you down. A slide can now push you a little past the top speed.
• You can slide down steep slopes. Crouch on any slope and you slide, even from a standstill.
• The camera drops lower when you crouch, and sliding has its own lean.

Added checkpoints so falling off the world doesn’t cost you progress, you’re dropped right back where you left off.

Also added a rewind effect and some new shader work to make it a bit more interesting.

Testing a gravity-shifting parkour game means a lot of running back to the same wall, over and over. So I built myself a dev console.

Now I can build more commands to change the world at runtime, instead of jumping back to the editor and re-running the game every time.

It’s a tool nobody playing will ever see. But I get from idea to test run in seconds now instead of minutes.