News

Slow and steady

28/11/24

Progress on Primal Dream in the last year has not been the very visible kind. More of a work intensive tweak here and there. At this point in time the player movement and animation is pretty much finished, with the exceptions of swimming and wading. I added a basic weather system on a whim, and designed a logo. There now exists a plan and flowchart for almost every enemy in the game, and level drafts are underway. Overall it's slow progress, but steady progress.

A funny thing to come to terms with is the realisation that the scope/design of the game is probably too simple for it to ever become popular. I will keep working on the game anyway, and hopefully it doesn't end up lost in the sea of mediocre indie games.

Asset Fatigue

29/09/22

The amount of art required for this platformer is far more than I anticipated. It's partly because my vision for the project has spiralled out of control, and also because I can't help raising the standards of my art. Animations are proving to be the most problematic. The art style I went with for this project is quite detailed - this makes it very time consuming to create animation frames. Further to this, I don't like choppy animation, and prefer fluid looking movements. This means most movements made by animals require at least four frames, instead of 2 or 3.

Pictured is the spritesheet for one of the fish enemies in the game. 13 frames of animation, and it's not a particularly complex animal. Even here there are shortcuts taken, like using smear frames or rotating/stretching frames to make new ones. This is different to how I make frames for the player sprite - for those I sketch each frame, before drawing refined and coloured frames, and then finally converting them to pixelart. Despite the work involved, I'm not going to scale things back at this point, so I've had to find further shortcuts I can take.

I'm currently trying to do this by animating sprites in Blender. The process begins with a pencil sketch of the animal, that is converted to pixel art by the usual method, before being cut up into bone-rigged planes in Blender. This has worked out pretty well so far. It only took around an hour to get animations for the pig-like creature finished and exported as image frames. The real test of this method will be the time spent downscaling and refining these frames in Aseprite. It's definitely a promising method - a quick test (not pictured) yielded pretty good results.

A New Project

25/02/22

I haven't been working on Divine Awakening for about a month or two. The reason for this is that I've realised that to finish it properly, it will take many years yet. So in the hopes of making a bit of income, and getting practice with finishing a game, I've been working on a simple 2D platformer.

My new game, Primal Dream, will follow a woman as she travels to a volcano to kill a dinosaur. Mostly, this game is going to be a chance for me to stretch artistically and do things I couldn't do with Divine Awakening, especially with the top-down perspective. I still haven't figured out exactly how the gameplay will work, but the "story" is pretty much finished. I want this game to be dreamlike (hence the name), and all about the setting. It might seem weak, but I've always found that great games often stand out for the simple things. Besides, there's a sad lack of prehistoric-themed games (at least that aren't straight-up goofy). Even though Primal Dream is well underway already, I'd like to be able to share more about it as it develops than what I did for Divine Awakening. Currently the plan is to finish the game by the end of the year, but only time will tell.