I was working on the chicken coop when the fact that 2D glow was supposed to be fixed in Godot 4.4..

This was actually something I had been waiting a long time for. 2D glow worked great in Godot 3.X but when I got around to adding glow effects to the game in 4.X I ran into some problems. One of the biggest issues was that the color threshold for glowing wasn't working. So anything white or close to it with a color value of 1.0 would glow even if your threshold was 1.0. Workarounds included making the modulate color less than 1.0 for everything you didn't want to glow but that felt like too much of a pain.

I spent a lot of time fiddling with the WorldEnvironment glow settings but couldn't get things where I wanted them. More over it felt like even if it was close, I would eventually need to add more things that needed to glow and I would have to remember all the tweaks etc.

After tracking the issue for awhile it sounded like it was a common problem (it had to do with the bigger renderer changes in Godot 4.X) and it would get sorted out eventually.

So in Godot 4.4 you simply have to go to your project settings and enabled "HDR 2D" and enabling glow in your world environment would work as expected. The most important thing being the HDR Threshold works!

It was a bit jarring once I enabled HDR 2D and ran the game because I left a lot of color values in the game that would glow while I was previously testing. Suddenly a lot of particles etc.. were glowing and way too much! I spent a few hours toning things down and adding a few places where glow might look OK. So far I am pretty happy with it but I will need to go through more of the game to optimize where things would look cool if they glowed.

Let me know if you think those gems shattering look good with the bit of glow!

(BTW, if you hate the glow effect you can turn it off in the game settings)