2021 blog 1

Here is the first blog post of the year! It's been quite a while since the last one. I meant to post an update about 2 weeks ago at the start of the holidays to put down what I'd managed to get done right before my end of year holidays started. I put it off then because I kept thinking "I'll just do a little bit more before posting..." at first, and then it became a bit daunting to write down everything I'd done - which by now is a lot.

The elephant in the room is that I didn't get the end of year demo done. Boo! Well, the good thing about having no investors or even interest in my project is that no one can be disappointed by this news. So, this blog post will cover two topics: what I've got done, and why the demo isn't ready yet.

Firstly: what have I done?

The two biggest achievements I have to report are the completion of the "ruins" spritesheet, and the main "blocking" out of the game overworld. Here's a look at the spritesheet:

The "ruins" spritesheet for the unincorporated areas

Man, that took a while to make! You'll notice right away that the sprites are sort of jumbled around and broken up. I had to squeeze every cell out of this spritesheet so I did a lot more culling of redundant textures than I usually do to try to make sure every cell was being used. 

Overall, I'm really happy with this spritesheet. I think I've improved a lot over this project so far, and some of my favourite spritework ever is on this sheet. The car and tarp-covered roof stand out to me as some of my best ever!

A car (based on a Morris Minor) before and after being abandoned

Once I'd finished the spritesheet for the ruins area I set about building out the ruins area in the game world. My plan was to build the area only to the extent that would be explorable in the demo/game intro. Then, I would focus on the cutscenes and game logic for the demo/game intro and have the demo done by now... However, what happened was that as I started building out the intro area, I realised that I couldn't build up the exits without building the areas they exited into - and then, I couldn't build those areas without also being the areas they lead to. Otherwise, how would I know whether the map size/pacing/layout was correct for the areas I'd already made? So it pretty quickly turned into the job of "let's lay down the entire game map".

The demo area I build first

A higher-level view showing the surrounding areas being built out

It's hard to get a grip of the game pacing while doing this. I can walk around in game and see how long it takes, but without the audio, objectives, or finished art it's hard to really "feel" whether a distance is too short or long. The player shouldn't get bored of walking around and they shouldn't get hopelessly lost, but at the same time exploration and taking in the environment is a part of my game's world and even its story. I brought the Arcadians much closer to the starting area and moved them away again twice while debating this issue, before finally just accepting that I won't get it right the first time, and I'm going to have to tweak it later anyway.

Here's a couple of miscellaneous images showing some of the environmental art in further detail

A nice beach under construction (minus the water!)

A mockup of a ruined ruined area I did while testing sprite contrast/colour

One issue I've come across while testing the placement of my sprites is that is can be very hard for the player to know where they can and can't walk. Sometimes a wall or object blocks you when you feel it shouldn't, or you can't walk somewhere you feel you should be able to. I'm not 100% on how to fix this yet. I'm not even sure if it's just an issue with certain sprites that I need to fix on a case-by-case or whether it's a fundamental issue with the way I've designed my presentation. My plan for this is to research into other games using my 2.5D art style and see how they work. I'll report back if I learn anything important from this.

Finally, I did some additional art for the game's intro (and the demo). At the start of the game the player will go through a brief "flashback" montage, giving them some context and showing them the mechanics of the game. This flashback sequence will involve two separate segments where the player controls the main character as a young child and then as a teenager as time skips forward. The final segment has the player as an adult as the game begins. To handle these timeskips, I needed to make art that could be "aged"; hence, the rusted out car and broken buildings. In addition, I needed some new NPC art for the new characters, and their aged versions.

A character portrait with three stages of aging

A character portrait with two stages of aging

Various aged sprites for the above characters

Of course, when presenting the same character with years between it doesn't make a huge amount of sense to show them wearing the exact same clothes and in the exact same pose. Obviously though, it's more important that the player understands what's happening instantly. 

So as for what's next now?
I'm going to be continuing to work on the main map while performing some side research into my sprite/movement difficulties. I'll also still be mainly working towards the demo. While I don't feel pressured to have it done "asap", I still want to make sure it's done soon.

Also hopefully it's not a bad omen but this blog ended up taking me three days to write (normally I write them in one sitting over like an hour) and it's not to the same standards as my earliest posts. Only time will tell....