Hello game lovers!
Today I wanted to show you the first video of Johnny Neo, showing my integration of the CBNA smartlight code to give pixel perfect lighting and shading.
CBNA are a team of awesome developers from France and you can check out their engine here: CBNA on YOYO. What makes this truly brilliant is that the cool dudes at CBNA have given this extremely powerful engine/code away for free – truly great devs who are willing to help out newer (and less experienced) devs like myself! The engine itself is incredibly powerful; thanks to its use of surfaces and sprite-based systems, everything is not only pixel-perfect but also 100% adaptable and malleable like a piece of squidgy digital putty. I should warn you however, this code is not for the feint-hearted… It took me a good few weeks to really master their system and adapt it to my needs, but once the system is fully integrated into my/your games, the results are truly spectacular.
Here’s a brief example of their code (and yes the notes are in French although there is an English translation available to help you understand it!)
As I said before, I wouldn’t recommend it for complete beginners, but once you’ve been using Game Maker for 6 months or so (depending on previous experience or lack-of) integrating the CBNA system and adapting it to suit your game should be a matter of hours work rather than days! The great part is that the system is modular, so if you only want a day/night cyle for general ambience you can do that, however if you want shadows too, simnply code that script into your objects and boom – the sun will be casting shadows with very little cpu increase. You can also add multiple free-roaming lights too so depending on how high-end you want your game you could even have lighting effects on every single bullet – although in my opinion that makes games inaccessible to to most people, so I personally stick with ambient effects and the occasional player-torch or similar. Anyway, before I bore you all to death, check out my latest Johnny Neo video below!
As always, please do comment or feel free to leave questions below, I make for others to play so your opinion always matters to me! 🙂