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[Nick Mudry]

What's wrong with the fonts? I like it - clean and very readable. Yes, they are totally different from the low-pixel look, but they also occupy a separate space and the design is consistent within that separate space.

I'd agree with you. The fonts are very nice and clean. Not sure what anyone would find wrong with them...

Great looking game though. Looking to stay up to date with it!

[Steaky]

Hey Guys,

Just a small update this week... I've mostly been working on behind-the-scene stuff.  But... I did add something that's a bit cool :

Wide Mode!

When I started working on the game, I assumed it would be full screen.  Pretty soon, though, I realized that was a bad idea.  As soon as you start spacing the letter tiles out, it becomes very hard to scan them for words.  

For that reason, I went with the narrow window size.  It worked well with the GUI elements I had layed out, and also fit with my goal of making it look a bit like a book cover.  It's also nice to have a small window you can drag off to the side if you're multitasking.

As I was working in editor, however, I usually had the window to all sorts of random sizes.  I started to really like the wide view, and so I thought it would be a nice option to include.  You can switch between wide and narrow on the fly

Also, thanks again everyone for the feedback!!

[JobLeonard]

You mean portrait and landscape modes, right?

Or is this running on windows/mac/linux? I thought it was a tablet/phone game?

[Steaky]

No, it's PC/Mac right now.

(Though I started work on a mobile version this week )

[JobLeonard]

Ah, ok. I guess I assumed it was mobile because of the portrait format in the earlier screenshots.

[Steaky]

Yeah, makes sense...

Even if it ends up on mobile, it'll be best on PC because you can use the keyboard

[Steaky]

Hey Everyone!

I spent a lot of time this week tuning the game, so there's not too much to show... but here's a screenshot of The Ruins (which is the second stage you visit).

I also spent a bit of time this week implementing the turn-based mode.  From the start, I designed the game with the idea that it would take place in real time.  I like this about it, because it feels a bit more exciting than other similar games, and as I've said before, it gives it a bit of a typing-game feeling.  

The downside to this is that you rarely see whats going on up top during a battle.  Along with being a bit challenging for newer players, I decide that having an optional turn-based mode might not be a bad idea.  I looked into it this week, and while it does work, it's not great.

First, a lot of the skills and buffs for the Heroes only make sense in real time.  A great example is a hero who sleeps an enemy, meaning they wont attack until they wake up by being hit.  This works great in real time, since it gives you a large amount of time to find a really good word.  In turn based mode, obviously, it breaks.  Other things like stuns and slows break too, or become a bit overpowered (it becomes very easy to stun lock an enemy).

In most cases, I was able to find suitable work arounds for these problems.  Slows in turn based mode, for example, increased the chance a monster would miss his turn.  For the example above, I replaced the sleep effect with a weaken for X turns.  I wasn't thrilled with the idea of skills being different depending on what mode you were in, but I assumed people would just choose one or the other, at which point its not a huge deal.  But even then, it felt off.

A lot of what makes this game feel unique got lost as soon as I started playing in turn-based mode.  Especially in the early stages when you only had access to your basic attack, you could always find a word using a skill tile, and so it felt like a boring back and forth.  You couldn't avoid taking damage, or defeat the monster any faster, and it lost all intensity.

For that reason, last night I decided to scrap the idea.  A bit of time and effort wasted, but I'm glad I got to try it out, because up until I played it I would have thought it was a great idea

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Yooo this game looks dope! Really nice art. I felt all the pixel stuff was a lil muddy and low contrast at first but after looking at it, it fits super well within the context of the game/ui. Very nice use of screenspace and colors/graphic design. That blackspace between the pixel art and the UI does a very good job avoiding any weird mixed resolution look.

Here's something I don't get about mixing 3D and pixel sprite art: why not render the 3D at an extremely low resolution in some FBO (matching the pixel resolution, to be precise) so that it integrates more nicely, then nearest neighbour upscale it to the resolution of the screen? Wouldn't that solve the clash in styles? Plush be extremely fast to render even on old hardware.

I'm working on a project a game that mixes 2d and 3d art a lot right now. If you try to mix 2d and 3d with pixel art:

You're going to get really weird results this way without crazy tweaking. Pixel art is hand-authored at the native resolution for a reason -- you'll get the kind of loss of detail, bad contrast, and messed up/jaggy shapes as you would from downscaling high-res art. Its definitely possible, and with certain very clean artstyles it can work, but it's not really practical -- especially considering his game only uses environment pieces from one particular camera angle, it's probably way cheaper to author them as 2d assets.

[Steaky]

Thanks Catguy!

I'm still not sure if 3D would have been faster, probably not by the time I had to make textures too.  No regrets though, I'm super happy with how it looks, that tends to be the main compliment the game gets

[JobLeonard]

You're going to get really weird results this way without crazy tweaking. Pixel art is hand-authored at the native resolution for a reason -- you'll get the kind of loss of detail, bad contrast, and messed up/jaggy shapes as you would from downscaling high-res art. Its definitely possible, and with certain very clean artstyles it can work, but it's not really practical -- especially considering his game only uses environment pieces from one particular camera angle, it's probably way cheaper to author them as 2d assets.

Check. Although there's this guy at Microsoft working on the "converting vector art to pixel art" problem - probably would make things at least a bit less impractical.

[Steaky]

Hey Everyone!

Not too much to show off this week, I've mostly spent the last week tuning the game and fixing some bugs.  I finished off a couple more monsters though :

[JobLeonard]

 

[Steaky]

The Outlands - One of the later stages you visit.

[Steaky]

Hey Guys!

I'm still working away at polishing / bug fixing the game.  It's pretty close now, which is exciting

I've got a new environment to show off this week : The Pass!

I also finished up a couple more monsters:

Finally, I've also been posting some gifs recently.  The full gallery is here : http://imgur.com/a/BrMPl

Like I said, I think the game is getting pretty close, so there should be big news in the coming weeks

[JobLeonard]

I'm really looking forward to playing this!

[and]

Love the concept and the art style. Good luck with it!

[Steaky]

Thanks guys!

The game is nearly done, so it should be out very soon now

This week I've got another stage to show off - The Depths

This also shows off the trap minigame, which I don't think I've talked about yet.  To disarm the trap, you need to spell words using the tiles.  When you spell a word, the tiles are removed.  Any tiles that remain once time expires result in damage, so your goal is to clear the whole board.

I also posted a couple more gifs of various attacks.  You can see the whole gallery here : http://imgur.com/a/BrMPl

I like this one quite a bit.  Noble Assassin's strong attack is called Smoke Bomb, and it allows him to dodge incoming damage for a set amount of time.

[ephoete]

Beautiful! Are you doing all these pixels and these lines of code alone?

[Steaky]

Yup.  I got some music and SFX from the web, but besides that it's a solo project

[JobLeonard]

Friend of mine recently ported bfxr to javascript:

http://jfxr.frozenfractal.com/

... if you want to generate your own sound effects