Boom Trick: "Hidden Ink" Messages

[JadingTsunami]

In this mapset I included a few effects that I thought might be interesting to others. Here is one example involving "hidden ink."

 

If you want a hidden message to appear when a switch is pressed (or even when something like an invulnerability is picked up), you can use Boom's custom colormaps to highlight certain colors. This effect is like secret ink under a UV light.

In Map03, there is a secret hiding an early BFG. To lower it, there is a combination lock that requires the right numbers to be entered in sequence. But, what is the combination?

 

Spoiler

 

The answer lies in another secret elsewhere. There is a scrambled wall of apparent garbage.

 

Spoiler

 

Pressing a switch on the nearby wall turns on the magic light. Now a hidden number appears in stark contrast.
 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

A switch on the other side of the room turns on another secret light.

 

Spoiler

 

Now a "6" appears on the same wall as before.

 

Spoiler

 

Thus the combination is 4-6 (or 6-4, it's order independent), and the BFG lowers.

 

How to do it?

 

Boom allows custom COLORMAPs to be loaded while inside a particular sector. See the tutorial here for how to do that.

What you will do is choose a range in the color map and change it to be one particular highlight color. Draw your hidden message in the colors that you replaced with the highlight color. I chose to make all the other colors the same to make the effect more stark and look more like a strange UV light, but you may choose to leave them intact if you prefer the effect that way.

Here is the example with blue/orange highlights:

 

As you can see, I did not do any shading, so under the UV light, everything is fullbright. This I find also helps "sell" the effect.

With this, you can create hidden messages in plain view!

[Dusty_Rhodes]

This is incredibly creative. Love the idea.

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

2 minutes ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

This is incredibly creative. Love the idea.

Second to that. This is awesome

[Hitboi]

Pretty creative! But the custom green colormap you used makes the shotgun and some sprites in the screenshots look a little messed up.

[Dark Pulse]

On 7/2/2022 at 3:25 PM, Hitboi said:

Pretty creative! But the custom green colormap you used makes the shotgun and some sprites in the screenshots look a little messed up.

Only so much can be done with a COLORMAP.

 

To be fair, the trick could probably be tuned to still give the effect while not killing the sprites.

[JadingTsunami]

5 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

To be fair, the trick could probably be tuned to still give the effect while not killing the sprites.

 

It certainly can; this was merely shown by way of an example. Alternatively you could make a small section (or even a single pixel type that is rarely used) of the palette colorized and put the rest in grayscale, for instance, which would make only the "hidden ink" part appear in sharp relief. There are many options.