Thanks! Honestly i havent worked on this in quite some time, however the past couple of weeks i've been able to do some major updates to this lighting system. Describing it doesnt do it justice, but i'll give you a list of the features i've added:

Customizable lights with varying size and brightness

smooth shading with the help of artificial dithering

realistic dynamic lighting utilizing shadows and emboss effects

and in fact i've even been able to implement soft shadows, however it will be too slow for realtime lights, but great for baked in lighting!!

 After looking at the live-demo I was very impressed. Even if it becomes a somewhat generic side-scrolling shooter, I think the lighting system would be enough to keep it interesting.

 actually i'm sure it would work well for other pixel art styles, it will just require a little more depth for more colors. However with this gb palette it will be fine the way it is. and me and my artists/programmers are hard at work on the new features of the engine, both graphically and with gameplay. Visually the project will be similar to the style used by vpk in his original mockup, but far more work will be involved. And as of right now an entire tileset has been made up that will replace everything you see here, and the main character is being worked on, and has a complete character sheet made up. The story will be deep, there will be lots of creepy atmosphere effects and noises, as well as many things you havent seen in a game like this before. We plan on kicking contra in the ass with this game, so keep your eyes on it.

Also, bit of an addition, different art styles in general will require different lighting setups, should they require lighting. This lighting engine suits this current game perfectly, but any different game, or different art style should use it's own approach.

OK, that does clarify, thanks.

I meant different pixel art styles. It looks like it presently depends lots on vpk's very basic choices of rendering. I might be wrong in this though, but I'm not sure it would blend as well with more elaborate shading / texturing / palette. Lots of pixelling work ahead anyways.

 I did mention the art this is based on was from vpk already. So far the work that i have put into this tech demo is repixelling the entire level 6 different times as well as repixelling the main character 6 different times, and the programming that creates the lighting functions.

And i'm not sure by your second question, what kind of different art style? Different pixel art, or different art all together?

Please link to the original art.

I don't really understand what your actual part in this is: coding?

Also how could this work with a completely different art style?

 Haha actually this is just a screen capture from the current demo, i'll post another one here soon after i get a little special something something added to it lol. This next example should really show off the features of Hyperion's lighting system.

I think it uses more distinct colors of decreasing lightness than what we see in the final screen. It might look even cooler if it was using a bump map / normal map. But it would be even more tricky to design the tiles, and cpu-intensive to add several light sources (At the moment, light sources can combine rather easily with a formula "max(a,b)", and I think it looks very good if you can use lights that expand and shrink back).

 hey check your pm's carnivac :)

 it's been brought to my attention that I should alert you guys to the fact that this artwork you see here is currently placeholder stuff, merely meant to show off the lighting ststem in place for the project. In fact the background is taken from a heavily modified mockup created by vpk for a gameboy demake of doom 3, which is really what got me inspired to create this project in the first place, and all the art you see will be replaced with original work once the project gets off the ground.

i would like to know more but i don't use yahoo or aim. 

 yea it will work  with as many as I want, and in whatever shapes I want them to have, will be cool once I get fire with flickering lights lol. If you want carnivac, we can chat over yahoo or aim if you wanna know a bit more.

Be sure i'll be there... To test your next demo !  

I just cannot work out how you've done this and it's driving me crazy :P   Does it work with multiple light sources too?

 i_d make this an animation but I'm not at home right now, but I will as soon as I can. I actually posted  this one in a hurry cuz I had to go  to work lol.

It's for sure a really great 2D shadow engine !

Maybe you coud make a captube by step to animate it, it will catch people's eye for sure !  

thanks for all the replies everyone. Didn't think that thid would be so well accepted. I've chosen 4 colors for the asthetic, but this would be just as easily done in 16 and 32 colors. In fact for the project an idea I had was to have the player choose in the start of the game whether to play gameboy 4 colors, or snes palette with slightly higher resolution. The lighting effect would be done the same way. I plan on setting up a project page on indie db once this project moves far enough along.. Again guys, thanks for showing all your support :)

Woah, that lightning effect is just awesome!

is it graphically hard to set up? And is it done by amount of colors?  I mean is it easily doable for 16 and 32 colors or is this a 4 color game for technical reasons and not just aesthetic?

It doesn't work for me...

I never download .exe files, I did this time and I'm definitely happy I did. That light effect is just wonderful.

The still piece is really flat by comparison, I'd suggest to make an animation.

This has potential to be epic. Do you have a project homepage? I am so interested in following your progress!

 it involves lots of layers, but the effect only took about 20 minutes to program. However I still need to get shadows and whatnot working. This project would greatly benefit from an artis as good as yourself carnivac. I really envy your talents. :)

Hm, interesting tech demo.  How did you go about that?

Like I said earlier, the demo is awesome! This really has potential.