Experimenting with nighttime through programming instead of post-processing (Patreon)

If you look at the above images and think, "these look exactly the same," that's a good thing. The goal is for the new image to replace the original image. However, I think I only near-perfectly nailed it on the Amy one. It's an imprecise process.

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Today I got caught up messing with nighttime compression on certain animations that I salvaged from the hard drive failure, that were preserved purely because I shared them here on Patreon. These posed a problem because I have to download the already-compressed gif from Patreon, split it up into frames, then export those frames out, compressing it further. For the daytime, it mostly works fine, but for night, where compression is extra noticeable...it was proving to be a problem.

While trying to figure out a solution, I decided to circle back to something I considered long ago: What if I used programming to produce the nighttime images, instead of post-processing in Blender or Gimp?

That is to say, instead of having a day image and a night image in the game's resource file, I could JUST have a day image that gets color-tinted to night when it's shown to you in-game?

Why do we care?

Because this would mean the game's file size could be around 30-40% smaller, without changing or removing any content. I know my game is already under half a gig, but I just think it's sweet if I can make something disgustingly space-efficient for the level of content it has. It's also practice for my next game, where I'll consider applying these methods right out the gate.

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One of Samantha's new animations was compressing poorly in the nighttime version, and I couldn't figure out how to fix it without the .blend file.Well, applying this method today seemed to fix it quite nicely, as the daytime version doesn't have a compression issue. Shaved 1-2 MB off the file size and improved the quality, which feels like an absolute win!

Am I actually going to go through and remove ALL the nighttime images in the game and replace them with code? Ehh, I doubt it. There are some downsides, and it's a lot of work. And some people probably like poking through the resource files instead of playing the game. I'm not going to let that last reason stop me from doing this, but it isn't my goal to disrupt stuff like that.Still, I could apply this to several of the nighttime animations, at least, and carve off some space.

Anyway, gonna get back to it. I am working on the Samantha wedding stuff too, I swear!