Devlog #1 - Meet the Elements!

The past month has been pretty hectic — a lot has changed and we just got our Steam page up too.

So we thought it’ll be a good idea to share some of cooler stuff we’ve been working on so far. Today, we’re going to talk about the elements!

At the core of Glowkeeper are the elements that make up the world. Each element serves a unique function in puzzle solving and exploring the world, so we wanted to give each element a distinctive style too:

Each piece has a different effect when linked up, and every single one of these things was made with some variation of Godot’s Particles! At it’s core it’s like a certain sprite being emitted many times, following some parameters like size, velocity, etc. There’s so many parameters and I don’t even know how to use most of them properly. But there’s some which are really cool and I wanted to share here:

When you link 3 scrolls together, they combine at the last scroll. I wanted to make this interaction clear so I thought of making the particles all float towards the last scroll as if the energy is concentrating in there.

It turns out there’s a parameter called radial velocity — how fast the particles should move towards (or away from) a center point. If we specify the center point as the position of the last scroll, we get this kind of effect:

While it works, it feels like the particles are moving in a straight line towards a single point and makes the effect look too simplistic. To fix this, we add a different kind of velocity called orbit velocity, which is the speed at which the particles orbit around the same center point.

This makes the particles movement a bit more chaotic and it looks like it moves more in a curve than in a straight line. It’s a small change, but I think it makes the effect look fuller.

Here’s another one. I wanted to make rock the most “jagged” of the shatter effects, so I tried to make the shards spin chaotically. To achieve that effect, I tried to make the shards rotate a lot. Not just along the plane, but in and out of the plane too:

It’s pretty subtle in the actual shatter but if I make the curve more extreme, you can see it rotating in and out of the plane. Actually, all that’s happening is that I’m using a curve to specify how much the sprite should squish vertically. By making it squish then expand back, it creates the effect of the rotating in and out.

While bucketfish was busy with all the amazing piece and background art, I decided to explore some of the visual effects. As a self-proclaimed “can’t do art person”, I was pleasantly surprised at the kind of visual effects I could make without drawing anything. In fact, all of the different shapes the particles produced can all be made in the engine itself (using GradientTexture2D and then adjusting the parameters).

I hope to write these devlogs so you can get a glimpse at the design and development process (hopefully without going too technical), and also as a way for me to reflect on the moments which made me go “woahhhh I could do this”. If you enjoy these devlogs, do subscribe to the newsletter/blog for more updates and devlogs like this!

Thanks for reading! ~oolimry