11 Feb 2024 - Web build now up!

I finally got the web build to work! That's the only real update, no gameplay changes were made and the Windows and Linux downloadable files remain the same. The web build does differ ever so slightly in the color palette from the original version but it's barely noticeable. If you're interested in why that is and why there wasn't a web build in the first place I'll cover that below.

So I used this shader for the palette filter in the game and I thought everything was fine until I uploaded the web version of the game to itch and found out that the screen was completely black despite the game running. After some trial and error, I found out that if I turn off the shader the screen is visible but obviously I couldn't upload the game without it since without it the game looks like this...

So because of this, I just didn't upload a web version at all, which if you upload jam games on itch, you'll know how much that sucks. I tried to fix it after the jam as well while I was adding some quality of life improvements but still couldn't find the reason for this.

That is, until today, the day I'm writing this post. I tried modifying the shader to use a palette that I input by hand instead of giving it a sample image and turns out that worked. Not only did it work, it actually applied the filter perfectly... yes... all this time the palette filter wasn't actually applying the correct colors. And I somehow had never noticed how colors not present in the palette appeared in the game...

Now this is of no fault of the creator of the shader but entirely mine. For some reason, when importing the palette image file to Godot, I gave it some pretty weird import settings that distorted it to be something quite different from what it was.

After finding that out, I tried exporting the game with the shader using the correctly imported palette file this time and it worked! I'm honestly not sure why up until now it worked for desktop builds but not in the browser, despite the import settings.

The game might've worked now in the browser, but the palette made everything look very different and not in a good way. Everything was a lot more green, which is what the darkest colors of the palette are so it made sense. That meant that now I had to find out what colors the game had used up until now and create a new palette based on them. With the help of a color picker the job was over quickly and the web version of the game finally resembled the others.

So yeah... this is why the colors might be slightly different. I did use a color picker to get the colors from the original game but there are still some slight differences. Thinking back, I remember feeling very lucky for stumbling upon such a perfect palette for my game so fast. Little did I know, not only was I lucky that I found it, I was also lucky to accidentally distort in such a way to create those colors 😅