I wasn't sure how I was going to do the general timeline or the cycle, but I realized just gradually changing it day to night creates some problems...
Merely tilting the direction light creates these weird edges along the shadows, and with every texture built to be pixel-art like means everything is just very jagged. I am at the whim's of Godot's lighting engine though and don't have time to messing with this too much. The goal is to just make sure this isn't super obvious.
So I decided to just transition quickly to 5 possible blends in 0.25 increments:
I don't really like some settings as it's arbitrarily decided by the computer of what the colors will look like, but I don't have time to personally edit them individually. All of the elements in this scene are just tied to a single variable going from 0 to 1. Not really hard to do but it's a matter of organization once again. The current timeline of the whole train sort of works like this:
-Leave Station
-Ride for a bit
-Arrive at new station
-Gradually add 0.25 to the day to night blend
Repeat. All of the train stations are the same atm, but I'll probably swap them out for different layouts. The idea is to use the buildings to hide/distract from the transition.
The player might not notice as you pull into a station, but that's the idea. It's not a realistic simulation at all, but abstractly I'm not personally tracking the daylight in real life either.
Next up is adding some kind of inventory system for the activities I want the player to do. It's not gonna be much but it's something. Stay tuned.