I got lots of smaller things done in Abstráctomon this week. Here’s a quick rundown:

You can now buy berries and seeds from a lady in the Gardencenter. Seeds can be planted instead of a berry if you don’t want to “waste” a berry.

Roughly 12 years after I graduated high school I finally figured out how sine and cosine work… So now reflections in water can have a wavy distortion. I’ll probably use this for other effects (e.g. in battle) as well.

Blending a sprite in Gamemaker with a different color is quite easy to do, but for some reason if you want to color a sprite completely white, you have to do some trickery. I ended up switching to 3D mode (d3d) for a fraction of a second to enable white “fog” and then had to alter the distance of that fog to fade the “whitness” in an out. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Bonus Gamemaker 8 tip:
Since I added the “backlight” brightness setting to the game, I had an annoying issue with the text flickering when lowering the brightness (archived by a subtracting blendmode). I finally figured out the reason:

To reduce lag in the menus caused by my crappy text script, I draw the text only for one frame, take a screenshot and then display that instead. But apparently Gamemaker’s screenshots turn gray / black parts of the image slightly transparent (why???), hence the difference in the hue of the text.

I tried to draw a black rectangle under the sprite but here’s a much easier fix:

To fix this, you can draw the screenshot with the blend mode draw_set_blend_mode_ext(bm_one,bm_src_alpha_sat);
which will ensure that the sprite drawn has its alpha set to 1 (= no transparency).