This is an important part of the game, since it's all about scary night-time encounters and the like.
In the first game, it gets dark, then light again in the morning. This is all from an overlay over the screen that changes in transparency depending on the time.
I tried something a bit more complicated for TAHC2. The first method I experimented with was to have a line 1440 pixels long (24 x 60), each pixel representing a minute. I could then make the line consist of gradients, going from black, to red (sunrise), to blue (midday) etc. This was a very flexible system and I thought it would be cool because people could port their own 'light sticks' into the game for their own campaigns. Unfortunately, 1440 pixels didn't lead to smooth transitions, so it would have to be a lot longer.
It ended getting complicated and I had to ask myself who would actually bother making a colour grid. It would also have to include another line representing the transparency of the light (since the darkness at night time would have to be more pronounced than, say, the faint glow of midday sun). I scrapped the idea, though it might be worth considering for future projects.
The final result is 4 simple coloured boxes; night, morning, afternoon and evening. I also add an extra layer to act as the darkness at night. I find this is nice, effective and smooth, as the colours blend between each other very smoothly and I don't feel that much more will be needed. With HWA I can place about 50 of these transparent layers before it begins to slow down on my LAPTOP, so I'm guessing that 5 should be fine for anyone's PC. (Expect another one for weather, mind).
Sure, these blogs are specialised in subject, but hopefully this has helped anybody who wants to try and make something similar and needs some possible methods to try out. I'm just pleased that I'm managing to make this game superior to the original in every possible way.
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3kliksphilip 
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