Update #77 "Crafting Shards and Squashing Bugs"

I'm grateful for Question pointing out the Full Size Image links. For a while I was thinking, "why is everyone praising the new lighting when you can't even see it?" But now that I can see it, yes, it looks pretty nice.

Dragon_of_Dojima Their departure from the development of the main title was announced about a year and a half ago, and it's been two and a half years since they had any part of the game.

Here's the post from Mana on these forums about the topic.

Not only was a major bug fixed and many other bugs are being resolved, we get a glimpse at a mechanic that is bound to add a great deal of fun to the experience. I've grown weary of crafting in games since it's become so common but this is wonderful. I can only begin to imagine the possibilities.

actually, theres a lot to glean from this, the lighting is much better and less resource intensive (means the artists can devote more time to making the visuals even better while the coders track down the remaining bugs), the difference between the look in the backer demo and the look in those screens is much improved, theyve spent a lot of time making sure the crafting is simple enough to not be intrusive, but not so shallow it wont scratch a completionists itch, menus are clean, clutter is well placed, colors are clean, miriam is easily recognisable even surrounded by a blue tinted room, the only thing i really want at the moment is to see it all in motion so we can see how the improvements interplay

I'm actually surprised and happy on how colorful those screenshots are, must be WayForward's direction. We have been pointing out how bland the game was before, and after a lot of feedback in that Graphics Downgrade thread, we can finally see some results. It's far from perfect, it seems they still have problems with materials, but at least the game looks a lot better now.

W-wow, are you sure? You've been around a long time, and even coming intermittently I'm sure you've seen one of these

Any of Iga's video interviews at events, his 50th birthday party when some of us met him in Texas, the donut campaign

This
i.imgur.com/C6MwzyD.jpg

In part leading to this
bloodstained.forums.net/thread/2647/operation-art-legacy

Also, the Japanese-English translation of updates or communication from Iga is also her.

I am a bit surprised so many people are happy with the lighting and colours. I personally find the stark contrast between light and dark is distracting and a bit much, I was expecting more blending of shadow. I get that colour, tonal, and texture contrasts are supposed to make objects pop out but it feels overly garish, Miriam being easily recognizable disrupts the scene for me. The stonework is very waxy and too clean. I will say I love the menus, very sharp.

But it's still a work in progress and just the first step, hopefully they will start heading in a darker direction.

Visual differentiation is important when playing so it's a fine line before things get muddy. I wouldn't expect things to get darker, but I'm sure some minor tweaking will still happen. 

Yeah, I want to say I agree with this, but I'm just not sure how I feel is applicable to how the how the whole/rest of the game would look. In that shot, it seems a bit too cartoonishly colorful and less sharply gothic than I expect, but I think maybe that can still have some adjustment. Also there's the consideration of a "2D look" vs realistic, and to that end I'd sacrifice some theme aesthetics for a 2D appearance. I think? It's hard to say, I really like gothic atmosphere too lol

"This is hard" - me, and them, I imagine