Reasons Games

What's new

• Launching the game now shows the Reasons Games studio badge first, for about three seconds.
• The badge fades up from near-black, drops the last pixel into place with a soft metal clank, and a single glint of light runs across the steel.
• It then fades back to near-black, and the title screen comes up from the same colour, so the two scenes join without a flash.
• Press any key, click, or press Cross to skip straight to the title.
• The engine's own loading logo no longer flashes up before the badge.

How it was made

1. The badge started as a large generated image on a flat magenta backdrop, which was keyed out to give a clean cut-out with no pink fringe or holes.
2. The art is pixel art blown up about ten times, so it was not shrunk the usual way, which would blur it. A frequency check on its edges found its real grid: exactly 184 art pixels across and 176 down. The in-game badge takes one sample from the middle of each art pixel, so every pixel of the original survives at 1:1 on the 480x270 screen, with hard edges and no soft alpha.
3. The glint is drawn from the badge's own pixels in Aseprite. A three-pixel band brightens only the lit steel and rust and leaves the dark outline, cracks and shadows alone. It travels from the top left toward the bottom right, the same direction as the game's light, over ten 40 ms frames.
4. In Godot the whole splash runs on one clock: a 0.4 s fade in, the 1 px settle and clank, the glint at 1.1 s, a 0.4 s fade out from 2.6 s, then the title. Key presses in the first quarter-second are ignored, the same launch grace the title uses, so a key still held from the launcher doesn't skip it.

Tools used

How to try it

Known issues

• The badge always shows on launch. A setting to turn it off may come with the settings menu.