The town now looks like what it is about
The title screen has always looked right: a bruised purple dusk over a wet street, neon, and a sign that says "A NICE PLACE TO STAY". The town in daylight did not. It was flat and evenly lit, with candy-red awnings and a bright green lawn, and it read like a cosy farming game in the first ten minutes a player sees. This update changes that on purpose, as a departure from the original browser version.
The new look is a late afternoon rather than a brochure. Daylight is held back a little, highlights lean warm amber, shadows lean cool violet, the greens turn toward olive and the corners darken. Neon and street lamps keep their colour, so whatever warmth is left in the town reads as the lure.
The idea is that the town is pleasant and a little too still, and that the strangeness arrives from one direction. Colour now drains toward the west. At the far end of the West Road the picture is about 58 percent of the way to a cold grey-blue, and that line is not fixed. Nothing on screen says any of this. A player just sees the town get quieter.
The old fog drew four rectangles one over another, and every seam was drawn twice, which left a bright line across the frame in every fog scene. It now uses fourteen steps that tile exactly. The new look follows the High and Low quality setting, and is left off when the game is compared against the browser version so that comparison stays fair.
What has not been checked
This work was written and reviewed by reading. Nothing from it has been compiled or run.
- A reviewer read all 24 changed files, about 3,000 lines, and found one definite compile error, which was fixed. The first real compile is expected to find more.
- About 90 new tests were written, 8 of them for the look. None has been run.
- The look has been viewed in headless pictures only, and has not been seen in the running game.
- The last measured match against the browser version is 59.629% across 78 shots, and it has not been re-measured since.