So I finally got around to drawing something approaching a final Monk. I'm not that happy with how it turned out (because of my usual self-criticality in my art vis-a-vis it not turning out how I imagined it) but oh well.

Anyway, one of the things that I've done for this is to make a wind displacement effect. The monk lives on its own sprite sheet (shown above), and what you might notice is that the sprite sheet has two images - the monk on the left, and some glowy red bits with green haze on the right.

The red channel is the displacement attenuation, i.e. the amount that a pixel can displace when it's looked up, and the green channel is the wind map, i.e. how much displacement should occur. When a pixel of the monk renders, the shader is given the wind velocity and phase, and then the shader looks into the texture three times: it gets the red channel of the displacement map, the green channel of the displacement map offset (and wrapped around) by the phase, and then finally the actual texel offset by the computed displacement. It's actually a pretty simple effect but it's surprisingly effective.

I experimented with a few different ways of generating the wind map, and what I eventually settled on was Photoshop's "difference clouds" filter applied repeatedly. It seems to give a nice windy-looking entropy without it appearing too regular and too clustered; originally I thought I'd want the displacement map to be little Gaussian blobs scattered about but that ended up not looking very, you know, good.

Anyway! There's a few other things I've done since the last devlog:

• Improved the coin geometry and rerendered it (ugh)
• Moved the score background into the main spritesheet
• Implemented the gem visuals and made it so that pickups can change their rotation whenever they bounce (for this I just used some Photoshop vector shapes and blend modes, rather than going through the rigamarole of modeling and rendering it)
• Tweaked the coin physics and the background image

So, yeah! All I have left to do is to draw a bunch of animal heads. (Well, and wire up the code for that as well. Hopefully the next devlog!)