You said: we may need to improve our gameplay overall graphics, looks, maps looks, lighting, coloring
. Full night is now the default, so light matters more than ever. Below you'll find four whole looks, six lights you can add to any of them, and a board to say what we make better first.
Each look is today's frame repainted: same moment, same fighters, same floors. Drag a frame to compare it with today. Switch the arena or flip day and full night; every look follows, so you're always comparing the same shot. Pick one look.
Today's look, finished properly. Bright, tidy and toy-like, with the polish a top-chart mobile game has: richer colour behind the fight, a lit edge on every floor, soft contact shadows, haze between near and far, and a few drifting motes.
Mostly settings and a few small sprites: edge highlights, shadow blobs, one haze layer, particles. Days, not weeks. At full night it stays about as dark as today.
Night is the hero. Every fighter carries a rim of their own colour. Lanterns throw warm pools onto the floors, windows glow, and everything behind the fight falls into deep blue. You always know where you are and where the fight is.
Full night is now the default, and its problem is fighters and floors melting into the dark. Two things fix that: a rim makes a 25-pixel stickman readable against any background, and light pools mark the floors you can stand on. It's a light layer over today's art, so no map needs repainting.
A rim sprite on each fighter, additive light sprites, a lantern prop set per map, and a colour grade per map. Low-end phones drop the bloom first.
A comic book in motion. Thick ink lines, Ben-Day dots for shading, flat bold fills and a cream keyline that lifts fighters off the night. It's the T2 COMIC menus brought into the fight itself.
Every map gets re-inked (outlines, dot shading, flat fills baked into the sprites), plus one cheap dot shader. It matches the T2 COMIC theme; with T1 SPOTLIGHT menus it's a mix of two styles.
Painted worlds, crisp fighters. Skies and scenery look hand-painted: brush strokes, canvas grain, colour drifting from warm to cool. Everything you can stand on, and everyone you fight, stays sharp and flat.
New painted background art for every map; the play layer and the fighters stay as they are. It's the biggest art job of the four, and the most "premium" in store screenshots.
Each light works on its own and stacks with the others, whichever look you pick. Drag each card to see it alone. Add the ones you want: they switch on in the light stack below, so you see your exact mix in one frame.
Your picks, lit together on one frame at full night. The switches and the ADD buttons above are the same thing.
Six areas, placed by how much they'd lift the game (up) against how much work they are (right). The top-left corner is the cheap big wins. Tap the areas in the order you want them done; tap again to take one out.
The things every look and every light has to respect.
Only 2D tricks: rim sprites, additive light sprites and one cheap colour-grade pass. No full-screen blur on low-end Android; the quality setting drops bloom, then rays, first.
On a phone, a fighter in the wide arenas is about 25 px tall. In every look, their outline and colour stay the brightest, clearest thing on screen. Rims help the most.
Rims use the player's colour, so the colour-blind setting's shapes and patterns still lead. A team never depends on red vs green light alone.
All of this is visual only and changes nothing sent between phones. Two phones in the same room can even run different quality levels.