I was never really happy with how the night-time coast scene came out but with no events in it up until now, the released version was better than the “Make coast night scene” text on a black image that was there originally. But with a coming event in 0.5, I wanted to improve the scene somewhat from the ‘paint everything blue’ rush job that it was. 

To preface, HS has so many amazing screen effects (really shit lighting though) that can do a bunch of things to make stuff look better. In this instance, despite spending a stupid amount of time playing with the effects, I still couldn’t get the ‘assets’ to coalesce into something plausible. Instead, I set out on the arduous journey (google) to collect a bunch of ‘moonlit lake’ reference shots and started painting fucking rocks… 

The next step was figuring out how to make the moon luminescent. (The answer was literally in the problem) At first I tried playing around with the item settings but nothing was really working until (this was my derp moment) I remembered that the actual moon is not radiant so much as luminous… So after sticking a giant flashlight on it, it turned out pretty close to what I was looking for.

The rest of the scene was much the same trial and error that I won’t bore you with, but in the end I think it’s an improvement over what it was. What do you guys think?