I feel like there's something you guys have done with shaders or the graphics in general that makes everything look nicer. Did characters always have outlines? Have the quality of the tilesets and spell graphics been updated? I can't tell what it is. Maybe just the HUD makes everything look nicer, but the graphics feel more "video game"-y now.
Very glad to hear it! What you're seeing is the whole coming together, mainly. We've upgraded a number of smaller parts, and the color value of these newer components matches that of the older components and so on. If you look at some of the before and after pictures, you can see what I mean. The house in the grasslands looks different between both pictures, right? But it is 100% identical in both -- what's change is what's around the house, rather than the house itself. And that in turn changes your perception of the house, even down to the color the house looks to be.
Experienced artists and interior decorators both take great advantage of this effect, but it's been something I've been struggling with during this project, and only have been really figuring out lately. Partly through player feedback, partly through having time to experiment on my own.
The main things that have changed since the first beta version are:
1. Yes, the characters now have outlines -- that's the literally only thing different about them, though.
2. Some of the spell effects were upgraded, but not since October or so at the latest. However, a few of them do have better backgrounds laid down for them now (blackness for their additive effects to lie on top of, making them more vibrant rather than more washed out). Many others haven't changed at all, though.
3. The HUD and the GUI and the fonts have been majorly updated throughout, and use very different color values from before. This causes the perception of everything else to be different, even beyond just the complimentary colors stuff.
4. The skies have been hugely redone, of course, and there are also now the background parallax effects which also majorly change things. These two changes really affect the rest of the scene an enormous amount, perhaps moreso than any other set of changes to the art mentioned thus far.
5. There has also been new art added, mainly for interiors in the form of new furniture and such. But almost none of the pre-existing art has been touched at all (re-rendering the barrels, and getting rid of the vent pipes in favor of icicles being the two exceptions that I can recall).
6. There have also been a few isolated pieces of other things that have been improved in some fashion, such as the water effect or similar. But these are mostly isolated and wouldn't affect your overall perception of most scenes. And a few glitches with some of the spell effects were fixed so that there weren't straight lines cutting through diffuse glows, etc.
And... that's literally it. The whole really is more than the sum of its parts, to use the cliche; but only when the parts are all... what, synergistic? It's been a real eye-opener for me personally how much things like this change the overall perception of the art, and I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one seeing that it looks so much better.
