Welcome back to our devlogs. This time around, we wanted to share our approach to the different times of day in Grave Seasons!
Grave Seasons operates on a 24 hour schedule! Some of our favorite games have a hard line for when the player must get some rest. For us, with our goals of showcasing multiple facets of our town and its people, we didn’t want to create a hard stop during the night that would halt exploration.
Some of the most ominous moments in Grave Seasons can happen in the dark, and we wanted to embrace the ominous tonal shift that comes with night falling around you as you stay out too late poking around in your neighbor’s stuff.
In Grave Seasons, we wanted to explore the limits and benefits of a full 24 hour system. That meant even NPCs could wander at night alongside you. Late night drinking? Chilling out by the docks as the sun sets? These were all on the table, and would play into our goals of nuanced NPC schedules. We wanted to create a town that felt explorable, even when the moon was out.
After all, you did escape from prison, and allowing you to use the cover of night to poke at Ashenridge’s secrets just felt right. Time itself is a resource in our game, and while rest is still necessary to engage in our full farming loop, you might have to get inventive. We knew that players would want to take unusual actions in the face of the very unusual circumstance of taking on a supernatural serial killer in Ashenridge.
No matter what you do in Grave Seasons, “live” time is still ticking away. So how do we visualize that progression of time to the player?
A 24-hour day in Ashenridge is composed of different stages of light. Rather than having day and night as distinct states, letting the player travel through the town as time passed meant we paid a lot of attention to blending early morning into midday into early evening and then late night. Visualizing those changes in time, outside of just numbers on a clock and our calendar moving forward, was important in creating immersion and ambiance. The pixel art team worked hard to solidify these various time periods, and to make them feel lush, beautiful, yet navigable and well-lit.
Early in development, we experimented with shader lights, normal maps, and even dynamic shadows, but none of these quite suited the game’s hand-drawn scenes and isometric 2D perspective. It was a constant balance between fidelity, navigation, and our aesthetic goals. Careful curation of light and dark was paramount, in day and at night. Eventually we began experimenting with lookup tables and other color-tinting techniques that allowed us to simulate the effects of time of day while preserving stylistic specificity.
With a few deceptively simple material shaders and a tremendous amount of careful painting, we were able to dynamically render day and night, along with adverse weather. More importantly, this included custom overrides to ensure that character skin tone, sprite lights, and other visual details retain clarity across in-game conditions.
As we developed these times of day, we made the decision to paint very intentional, hand-sculpted lighting. That choice of lighting lends itself well to not only atmosphere, but also to environmental storytelling and level design. The realistic-leaning style of the lighting nudges the game more towards a grounded, noir kind of expression during the nighttime, and a very picturesque, Ghibli-vibe during the day. This helped the more calm, pastoral elements of the game mesh well with the creeping dread invoked as night falls and a new murder crests on the horizon each month.
Of course, creating these times of day meant crafting hand-painted lighting for just under 70 interiors (including customized lighting for your farm building upgrades!). This was a major task, but even for exteriors, our pixel art team “lights” the entire scene with these custom painted modes for day and night, then lights the winter version. Snow and ice change how light moves, after all, and we wanted to accommodate these terrain changes using the tools we developed.
The end result of this work was 70+ custom LUTs (Look-Up-Tables), hundreds of hand-painted “lights” with custom time-of-day tinting, literally hundreds of per-season tiles, and a very satisfying gradient that would allow players to visually track what time of day it was without losing a sense of immersion!
All of these tweaks, these experiments, and these hand-painted shifts in time follow the player and pushes them forward as they understand the beauty and horror of Ashenridge alike.
We announced our small delay as well as shared the news about our upcoming demo in our last devlog. We appreciate all the wonderful words of encouragement and support as we work towards release. Thank you!
We have reached 600k+ wishlists on Steam which is a huge milestone for us! Thank you!
More soon!
Perfect Garbage Team