What you see here is a very early look at the new Liquisity.

Click below to view the full picture.

It’s amazing how much has changed from Game Maker 5 to 7. With it, I’m able to do so much more with Liquisity than I ever was able to before. Part of that is GM, but most it is due to my better understanding of how GM works (I was a noob back then, and I consider myself a noob right now due to all the new stuff I find that I can do with GM!)

I plan to tell you all about Liquisity in the coming weeks and how it will differ, but let’s focus on one new element: the lighting.

The old alpha values is what I’ve been using in all my games; I’m now moving to a more advance use of the built in GM lighting that incorporates two levels of blend modes. The result is a much “softer” lighting: notice how in the above pic, surrounding plants are illuminated by the left light, whereas the right doesn’t have that subtle ability other than drenching surrounding areas in blue.

It’s hard to tell all the new stuff that’s going on in the pic, such as the swaying coral that uses a unique rotation engine (it’s more like wind than a simple image_angle variable) as well as all the rotating coral patched on the bottom (that’s a simple angle variable :p). There are some rough spots in that pic, but like I said, it’s a rough draft into something that I think will be very neat.

One last thing I’d like to announce: Liquisity 2 will be free for everyone. Why, I will post later. But that’s definitely 100% certain! Woo!