Some people had told us that our game looks so good to be a GameMaker Game and had asked what is our approach to make levels and the lighting system, so here is a small overview of the workflow from the Alien Prison level.

We start with a very basic lineart.

We add some basic color to get a better understanding of the shapes and forms we are working with.

We will add some lighting details and drop in some shadows. This will give us depth in the image.

Our next goal is to add some more details in the areas that feel empty.

Next is the photoshop magic by adding gradients, glows and some inner shadows by going into the blending options of the layer style.

We use some more photoshop magic by adding glowing lights and a transparent glass effect with some lines of glowing light. Added a basic ground tile.

To break the flow of the floor tiles we add some bigger details.

We complete the ground tiles by adding some detail in the empty areas. My goal was to give it that strong military look by creating some triangular shapes with inner bevel.

Now the pixel art is done and the code part Is not very complex; it consists of two objects and a couple lines of code, so let’s get deeper into the rabbit hole.

First we have our darkness layer object. It draws a black surface with an alpha of 0.75.

In another object we have the lights. We place them in the right place then the game looks like this:

But we don’t want it to look like that! So by using the draw_set_blend_mode(bm_subtract); everything that is white will be removed from the darkness layer and we will achieve our desired result.

That’s all for this overview, hope you find it useful and inspiring. If you have any questions feel free to ask.