A proper front door

What's new

• A title screen is now the first thing you see when you launch the game.
• The IRONFALL logo drops in from the top and settles with a small bounce.
• An airship flies in from the left with its nose dipped, brakes, levels out and settles into a slow hover with a gentle bob and sway. Its propeller spins fast while it travels and slows down once it stops, and the engine puffs out little clouds of exhaust.
• A START plaque, in the same rusted, riveted style as the logo, drops in under the ship once it has settled. It pulses while selected and squashes when you press it. A small QUIT sits under it.
• Press anything during the fly-in to skip straight to the menu.
• Quiet wind and the airship's engine hum play under the menu, with a soft confirm sound on START.
• START fades to black and drops you into the game.

How it was made

1. The art started from a Higgsfield image of the wasteland with the logo, plus a five-second Higgsfield clip of the airship on a flat coloured backdrop. The background was then remade without the title, and the logo was cut out on its own, so the logo can animate separately.
2. The clip couldn't be used as-is. While the backdrop colour drifted from magenta through cream to mint, the generator kept repainting the ship itself: about a third of its pixels changed from the first frame to the middle one. Played back, the ship would shimmer and boil.
3. So the ship was isolated from one frame, the first one, where the magenta backdrop keys out most cleanly. It was cut out by its corner colour with a soft edge and the pink spill removed, then shrunk so one ship pixel matches one background pixel and recoloured to the background's own colours, so it looks like part of the same painting.
4. Then it was re-animated by hand in Aseprite instead of using the video: a dark outline, a warm rim of light on the top and left edges (the sun comes from the top-left), a two-pixel band of light rolling across the tarp like wind on canvas, a one-pixel breathing dip for the deck hand, and a four-drawing propeller spin on its own layer.
5. The movement lives in Godot rather than in the frames: a cubic ease-out for the fly-in, a nose-down tilt that follows the ship's speed, the propeller speed tied to it as well, and a slow sine bob and sway for the hover. The exhaust is a small particle emitter on the engine block.
6. One early bug: a key still registered at launch was skipping the whole intro. The title now ignores input for the first quarter of a second, and there is a test for it.
7. There are 40 automated checks for the title: the ship starts fully off-screen, reaches the hover point on time, stays clear of the logo and above the treeline, the menu only appears once the ship has settled, skipping works with a key or the PS5 Cross button, and START leads into the game.

Tools used

How to try it

Known issues

• There is no CONTINUE option yet. It will appear once saving lands.
• There is no settings menu on the title screen yet.
• The character creator will slot in between START and the game in a later update.