The title screen wakes up

What's new

• The splash no longer cuts to black. Once the badge has finished dripping, the dark background fades away first while the badge stays put, so the badge briefly sits over the sunset scene. Then the badge fades, and a moment later the IRONFALL logo drops in and the airship flies in.
• The title background is alive. Cloud streaks drift very slowly across the sky, the sunbeam gently brightens and dims with dust motes floating in it, the robots' eyes pulse, and the big robot on the right sometimes flickers or sweeps its eyes. The treetops sway in the wind, a small flock of birds crosses the far sky now and then, fireflies drift over the plaza, and a thin wisp of smoke rises from one ruin. All of it is kept subtle so it never pulls your eye away from the logo, the airship or START.
• New title music: a slow, warm, slightly sad theme with fingerpicked guitar, soft cello and a low drone, with far-off machine clanks in the distance. It fades in as the scene appears, dips a little under the airship's engine, loops without a gap, and fades out when you press START. It also remembers where it stopped, so once there's a way back to the title from the game, the music will carry on instead of starting over.
• New splash sounds. The metal bong at the start is gone. Now there's a low rusty creak as the drips start, a quiet ooze under them, and three different drip sounds as the three droplets land: a bright ping, a heavier plop, and a hollow tink.
• A reduced-motion setting (GameState.reduced_motion) freezes all the background motion for anyone who prefers a still screen.

How it was made

1. The moving parts are cut straight from the original title painting. A script found the clouds, sunbeam, tree canopy, robot eyes and smoke in the 480x270 image and turned each one into a mask, and the masks were finished in Aseprite. In the game, a small shader moves only the masked pixels and always by whole pixels, so the pixel art stays sharp. Everything outside the masks is the original painting, pixel for pixel.
2. The two scenes now overlap. When the splash ends, it loads the title underneath itself instead of switching scenes, so the title's background, its motion and its music are already running while the dark layer melts away.
3. The music and splash sounds were generated with ElevenLabs: three takes of the theme (the second one won) and one take for each of the five splash sounds. The theme was cut to loop on a bar line with a short crossfade, and the loop point was checked for clicks by measuring the volume across three loops played back to back.
4. Tests check the order frame by frame: the dark layer reaches zero while the badge is still fully visible, then the badge reaches zero, and only then does the logo start to drop. They also check that the three drip sounds are three different files, that the old bong never plays, that skipping at any point lands on the menu with START selected. A render check in the real window measured the background motion at well under a tenth of a millisecond per frame.
5. The clip was recorded from the real game window, with sound, and the colours were checked against the original art.

Tools used

How to try it

Known issues

• There's no reduced-motion option in the settings menu yet. For now it's a flag in the game state, and it will be added to the settings menu once there is one.
• The birds and fireflies are only a few pixels in size, so they're easiest to see at full screen.