Shadows

The most common feedback I get for Frame is something along the lines of "Interesting mechanics, but why does the game look like shit?". One reason for this is, besides the lack of highly detailed props, probably the flat lighting. Todays game-engines use a whole plethora of tricks to achieve nice lighting effects. The problem is that basically non of these tricks (at least in the way they are implemented in the engine) cooperate with the portal-effect of Frame. This means that all kinds of lighting-features, which are usually just a few clicks away, are unusable for my purposes.

So as a last-ditch effort I decided to try out a custom implementation of shadows (again, the standard in-engine way of rendering shadows doesn't work for various reasons). One of the reasons I didn't want to use shadows is that I'm pretty sure that it can't be done in a 100% correct way without tripling the rendering time. By 100% correct I mean that the light (and thus the shadows) shine correct and recursively through all frames. So to have shadows, without an explosion in render-time, I decided to compromise and let every frame cast shadows, independently on whether they are closed or opened. Due to some visuals glitches in the current implementation I consider the shadows an experimental feature and they have to be manually activated in the menu.

I doubt that the shadow-effect is enough to satisfy all those graphic-whores out there. However, there are several levels, where the shadows at least help the player to "parse" the space (for example shadows are good for communicating the distance between an object and the ground). 

There are two new levels in this update, as well. Here is a level based on the observation that an object inside two frames with different sizes moves faster on the side of the bigger frame (and thus gives you more momentum). What I like about this level is that it, despite being rather difficult, doesn't require much walls and the player can get an overview of the level quite fast.

And here is a level that uses almost every single mechanic introduced throughout the game.

The bug-fix list is very short this time:

• Fixed yet another case where sometimes necessary collisions were wrongly deactivated. 
• Minor change to level "Move the Immovable" to avoid unintended solution (it was possible to just directly jump to the higher platform).