next »

[Mothil]

Well on my way to have functioning shrimp.

Fixed from last update:
- Shrimp has a responsive spawn-position relative to player.
- Moves in small bursts (Will work on this more).
- higher animation speed / movement (needs fine-tuning).

What should be done:
- fine-tune movement and animations.
- spawn animation? Right now they just appear "out of the blue".
- eaten animation (haven't thought about this much, but I think a small orange bubble flying to the top-left side of the screen to add points would be a nice visual).
- SFX (Needs to be subtly, don't want it to be distracting).

[JobLeonard]

Hah, they look like gliders in Conway's Game Of Life!

[Mothil]

I have no idea what that is but it looks awesome! 

[Mothil]

Figured I could do a ThrowbackThursday!
Here's Akiro, back when he had no name and was... an insect.

If there's interest for it, I would be more than happy to share my
initial designs and ideas for the game. Let's just say it did not start
out as Akiro.

[Mothil]

I haven't had the time to work on Akiro as much as I've wanted lately, so I thought I could share some of the first designs I made, and tell what my initial thoughts were. (err, "designs").

The first name I ever gave the game was "FlipFish". My project folder is still named that to this day. The whole reason I started creating this game is because I thought the movement function sounded fun, so I wanted to try it. Here is some of the first images (some not even screencaps, just with a phone) and it's quite fun to see how it has evolved.

This right here, is the first photo ever of the game. There was no functions, only that image drawn in one minute and just imported into Unity.



At first I had no idea what the game was going to be about. Because of the fluid movement, the very first thing I wanted to try was making the main character a fish. Slightly after that I scrapped that because I sucked at drawing fish from top.

Here's some of the first sketches, whereas I tried to find out what the theme was going to be:

From left to right: TestBug, Car (was thinking of naming it "Dodgy Drift" for a while), Beetle, Squid(!) and another squid. 



Here's another image. I should have added this one right after the pink, seeing as I used this character before the blue bug. Oh well. At first I did not think about using enemies at all. I wanted static colliders: lily pads, or as seen in the one under here; white placeholder bubble-thingies. I will add more early images later on, as well as the two first videos... recorded with my phone. 

[Mothil]

Added new build:

http://mothil.itch.io/akiro?secret=ni8mz3YkdyUMFyYtTRiVsraNY

[Mothil]

Working on the colors. Here are Akiro's colored after the color wheel:



What if this is the basic selection, and I could implement some sort of achievement system that could unlock more special skins. For example "retro Akiro" (grey colors), "Akiro Boy" (game boy colors), etcetera. And what if there's just a button click in the "character selection" that says: randomize colors?

Thoughts?

[Mothil]

Another new update, with some basic user interface:

http://mothil.itch.io/akiro?secret=ni8mz3YkdyUMFyYtTRiVsraNY

[Mothil]

Working a bit more on the GUI. Made some new buttons, but most importantly: gathered all the button drawings so they are not in two files, but one. Productivity yay!

Here's the current layout. I don't like it, but it's an improvement:
My thoughts:
Pros: simple style
Cons: Slightly poor colors, bad attempt at shading..



Will improve them soon. Any ideas how, and what kind of colors I should go for?

[Mothil]

Recolored the buttons and put together a rough layout of the character selection.

[Mothil]

I've been through a good mix of procrastination and vacation right now. I have worked a bit here and there, but not at all as much as I did earlier. I'm still on vacation at the moment, but I feel obligated to update more on social media - especially the devlogs.
I will soon start writing more again. Most likely the posts will gradually increase in the following two weeks.

[Mothil]

I'm closing in on two months with barely any updates now... wow! Time really flies.
Hopefully I'm getting back into working on my game real soon, as soon as I don't have my hands full in work, packing and moving. My desktop is about 9 hours away, so I'm on a laptop (This is relevant information because I have no gif maker on this mac yet). So instead of updating with a gif, I have to post this image.



Image: I've been fixing the positions, so now it correctly switches characters. (As you can see in the gif the posts over, the Akiros were funky positioned. Now they align perfectly at the top each time they are rotated.)

Looking forward to being more active here again.

[Mothil]

Back to sketching!

As of now I do not like most of my enemies. I'm happy with how the puffer fish works, as well as the shrimp. I'm not convinced with the other ones, so I grabbed my sketchbook to see if I got any better ideas. And I think I have one! While they all could be good, one I liked particularly much is the sea turtle.

Imagine it like a flipped Lakitu from Mario. He swims into the screen, tries to get right under you and after a while jumps into his shell and floats up trying to hit you. I think that sounds pretty fun! ... And intense. I do need some more casual enemies as well though, but I don't know which yet.

[JobLeonard]

I like the walrus sketch. Also, the lines are pretty good at conveying what movement you have in mind for them!

[Mothil]

Thank you JobLeonard! I was hoping they would illustrate it nicely.

Here's the rest of the page. Mostly just scribbles to see if any ideas stick.

[JobLeonard]

"tap or drag?"

Why not a bit of both: tap for acceleration boosts, drag for "riding it out" and aiming/gliding

EDIT: Or think of it differently: what kind of squid motions would tapping and dragging embody best?

[Mothil]

The tap or drag was for the color selection menu.

I've experimented a bit with movement, and if I'm not entirely wrong, it's best left as a very simple movement. My hopes for the game is that anyone can pick it up and enjoy it, so I don't want to make it any more advanced than it has to be.

[Mothil]

A quick movement sketch I did!



I ended up removing the Swordfish and the Jellyfish. I didn't feel like they were effective enough, hence why I'm adding this fella right here:

[JobLeonard]

You could still keep them as "ambient" life. Not everything has to be out to eat you

[Mothil]

That is very true!
I'll see if I can redesign the jelly movement and get it a bit more exciting, or... jelly-like.
One way I could do this is so that instead of changing directions like an L (sharp turns when they focus on Akiro) they could probably change directions like a U shape, or something more like a (.

But for now I'm going to implement the turtle. It's been a while since I did some programming now, so I'm a bit rusty.