Hey folks,
It’s been a while since my last post so I have a ton to talk about! The last week or so has seem some huge changes in the game. It hasn’t been anything as flashy as new enemies or levels, but rather a ton of deep system, and game changes.
GO GO Kudamono! is moving from being a cool personal project/experiment, to being my next official big game. This means that it has become time for me to revisit just about every decision I made at the start of the project to make sure it still made sense, as well as thinking more about my design philosophy for the game to make sure everything is as good as it can be. Here is an explanation of some of the things I’ve changed, discovered and am working on:
RESOLUTION
The game’s original resolution was very small (only about 320px x 180px ). This was because the game really just began as a little game meant to be played in a window. Now that I’m taking it to the big-leagues, it just didn’t make sense. After playing with different options for a long while, I came across this fantastic
Gamasutra interview with the fellows at Yacht Club Games. In it, they talk about how they chose a 240 x 400 resolution for their game to mimic a widescreen version of NES’s 240x256 resolution.
This got me curious as 240x256 is not the classic 3:4 ratio that was seen on TV, so after some research I learned that both the SNES and NES actually stretched their pixels to fit the 3:4 resolution. NES rendered a 15:16 pixel ratio, and SNES rendered a 7:8 ratio. Interestingly enough, Yacht Club Games chose a 3:5 ratio for Shovel Knight.
Something that is important to me, and one of the reasons why I believe Shovel Knight is so successful is that it not only is a retro-style game, but also has a lot of barely noticeable touches that give the experience an authentic older feel.
With that in mind, here’s what I ended up going with:
• 7.5:12 ratio - this makes each pixel about 1x1.116, giving it that subtle SNES feel. (although not as extreme as the original SNES’s stretching which was closer to 1x1.16.
• pixel perfect camera - the camera only moves in 1 pixel increments, this makes the game feel less ‘silky’ and helps to replicate that classing gaming feel.
CAMERA
Due to all of the camera size changes I decided to re-visit how I was handling it. Previously I was using camera ‘walls’ to define boundaries for where you could / could not see. This method was great for edges of the level, or destructible blockades, but did work very well when I wanted no movement on one of the axises at all. To solve this I added a new camera track system. The idea is that if an invisible camera track enters the camera’s view, it’ll smoothly lock on to it as you move. If you reach the end of the camera track, it’ll allow you to smoothly detach, or if you reach another, perpendicular or parallel camera track, you can move between them smoothly by getting close enough to the new track. Below is an image showing my camera test scene with tracks in blue, and a gif of the system in action.
ART
There have also been some major changes on the art front. Below is a before and after screenshot showing new design / detail / colors as well as the new resolution in action. Both the frog town and Barkopolis are getting a facelift- once they are closer to being complete I’ll make a video to show the changes.
OLD:
NEW:
Thanks for reading! <3
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