Chasing Elysium - Devlog #012
I released the v0.0.1 prototype to friends last month! Got some feedback which was greatly appreciated, both praise for things going well and information on things I need to improve. A new v0.0.2 prototype just went out to friends with this month's updates. I hope to put out a prototype every 3 months or so from here on.
Now then, let's go over the things I've done this month!
Refactoring
Oh hey more of this refactoring business. When I was wrapping up the prototype last month, I learned a few things about Godot and ran into some pain points with my code, particularly with putting cutscenes together. The first three days of the month were therefore dedicated to a bit of refactoring and reorganization.
Base Character Sprites
This month is dedicated primarily to creating assets for the game to start replacing the "programmer art" placeholders. I am by no means a proper pixel artist (yet!), but I'm happy to learn. The first asset I decided to make is a "base" sprite that I can skin to make actual characters. It'll make my life so much easier to have this base to build off of. I also took the time to finally expand my 4 directional sprites to 8 directions. Got the idle sprites and walking sprites done for this, as well as making both 32px and 26px variants. I'm probably going to need to make a base for each height just to enable a good spread of character heights. Just modifying the 32px sprite should be a decent way to start.
SOL-7243
Got the sprites for SOL-7243 who you play in the prologue done. Primarily worked on the flying sprites since SOL won't be walking. It took a bit to get it looking right, particularly the visor, but it's looking pretty good now! Might want to make a few adjustments to the torso to add a bit more visual interest. As a bonus, because these are flying sprites, I also added a set of back flight animations! It looks so good in-game.
Anti-Air Drone
It took 3 days to make the sprites for the enemy fought in the prologue. It only took 30 minutes to make the actual sprite. A small amount of the time was figuring out equations for lines of latitude and longitude for a tilted sphere. The vast majority of the time was me naively trying to simplify the equations so I could use the ellipse tool and then apply a RotSprite rotation for the lines of longitude. This failed miserably, but I did learn a lot about the math of ellipses. To do the lines of longitude, I ended up plotting the equations on desmos and tracing that. I think it came out very well and was well worth it, the sprites look gorgeous.
Adjusted Cutscene Perspective
The angle of the opening cutscene has been adjusted so the character flies in from the right rather than the top-right. A lot of little things were adjusted as a result. I spent a bunch of time this month trying to figure out the best, most consistent perspective to put the game's sprite work at. I ended up circling back around to isometric, right where I was at the start of the month. That said, despite winding up back at isometric, I am going to leave the opening cutscene with an orthogonal angle. As I rework the graphics more I intend to make sure everything looks nice and isometric, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have to use diagonal tiles. Just the 30 degree from horizontal perspective is basically sufficient for this particular scene.
Combat UI Animation
The combat UI now animates on and off the screen when entering or exiting combat! Nice little bit of polish that makes it feel a lot better.
Lighting Effects
I improved the lighting for the sunset effect during the tutorial fight so the water no longer turns black unintentionally. I also added some basic lighting to the camp fire with shadows.
Game Resolution
The game's resolution has been reduced from 640x360 to 384x216. This is a change from 1/3rd of 1080p to 1/5th of 1080p. This is done largely to enhance the inherent aesthetic of pixel art which relies heavily on the limited screen real estate. It also allows me to make more... reasonably sized sprites without them looking like ants.
Boot Menu
I added a boot menu so you aren't just dropped directly into the game! The boot menu has 3 options - start, license, and credits. Start will drop you into the game, license will show all the fun legal licensing information of the tools I used to make it, and credits will show the credits for the game itself, both those who have offered feedback via playtesting or by working on the game directly. I'll be expanding the credits to include others who have supported the game's development in other ways in the next build.