While I think the art assets themselves are good, the biggest issue I can see with your UI is the inconsistent spacing. The two most obvious cases where this is visible are the dialog select brackets and the inventory screen icon positioning.

Notice how it looks like the corners of the brackets don't line up with the corners of the box formed by the text? This can be fixed relatively easily by making them align with a diagonal line shooting in the corner's direction.



The way stuff is laid out in your inventory screen is also a bit misaligned. The time in the top right corner is placed a certain distance from the edges, while the icons in the top left are almost right next to the border of the window. The player is also in a bit of an akward spot, almost overlapping with other UI elements. Finally, while the map is in the middle of the blank space to the left of your inventory, the looking glass on the right is right on the edge. This is all minor stuff to fix though, and a quick mockup shows how you can change the positioning to make it look a bit better. It's a quick and dirty edit though, so there could be more changes that would make it look even nicer. You should definitely keep messing with all this to find the layout that works best for your game.



So yeah, tl;dr is that you should make sure things are always aligned properly. That's honestly half of UI design. Make sure things are aligned and spaced out in ways that look good and convey what goes together and what doesn't. Other than that, you've got a good start. I look forward to seeing your progress on this!

Impressive writeup!

Welcome!

Honestly, you've improved quite a lot! Your Vega and Jon Snow (I'm assuming that's him) pieces are already big improvements over your previous ones. I think the main issues with the space soldier piece are concepts which you've learned but didn't apply in this case, such as color theory and shading. There's another recurring issue in your pieces that I'd like to point out though, but I'll get to that in a bit.

First, the main thing I see with your latest sprite is that the colors you chose have very strict "dark to color to white" gradients. Like Schoq said earlier, you usually want darker shades to tend towards cold colors like blue or purple, and highlights to tend towards warm yellows or oranges, though in some rarer cases other colors can be appropriate. It may be tempting to think that this doesn't apply to gray, but it absolutely still does, as demonstrated by my quick edit below. This was done quickly just to illustrate my point though, so I'm sure you could get much better results if you messed around with the colors even more on your own.



In fact, one of the cheapest tricks you can use to improve almost any piece it to use a dark purple-ish color for its outlines, which actually brings me to my next point; you don't need that many outlines when you're drawing inside the subject of your art. See, contrary to one's intuition, sometimes it's actually better to not use outlines, especially with small details. Remember, outlines are a tool, and you use them to separate elements of your piece which should stick out, so if you want to make it look like two things of the same color are in fact separate, then an outline is the right thing to use. However, if an element is meant to "blend in" a bit, or be part of a bigger element, then it might look better to just draw it without outlining it. Here's a small example focusing on the chest armor where I changed the lines separating the breasts from the chest to make the transition more subtle, though again, this is a quick and imperfect edit.



Finally, the last real shortcoming I see here is the use of what is called "pillow shading". Pillow shading is when there's a tendency for highlights to follow edges and shadows to tend towards the middle, or vice versa, which either makes it look like the subject is lit from all angles or directly from the point of view, which usually looks less interesting. It's good to imagine a light source at a fixed point in your scene and to draw everything as either highlighted by or obscured from it. Again, here's a small edit, here focusing on the legs since that's the part where pillow shading was the most visible. If we imagine a light source coming from the top right, then we should see a shadow being cast on the legs by the canon, and there should only be highlights on the portions of her legs that face light directly, if at all. Notice how the shadows now seem to suggest what area the light is hitting, and how the highlights accentuate that in specific spots.



Other than that, I just want to say that you're improving! I hope you're having fun making these, and I look forward to your future posts!

Cheers!

Edit: Looks like Schoq beat me to it lol, though I didn't mention anything about the way the canon looks. But yes, if you're going for a metallic look, then stronger highlights are definitely a good idea here.

Hey, so it’s been a while huh?

Sorry about the long time without any update. Writing these is always a little daunting for me, so I end up avoiding it most of the time. That being said, I didn’t decide to post here today just to address the lack of updates lately. I’m also posting here because, a few weeks ago, I traveled all the way to Washington DC to showcase Space Punk Slam Dunk as MAGFest, and I thought I’d do a little post-mortem of my preparations for the event!

First off, I had to prepare the booth. Due to some communication friction between the organisers and me (some of it my fault admittedly) I was a bit late to organize everything in time for the event. Most of the trouble I experience came from the fact that I didn’t know for sure how big our booth was going to be for a long time, so I had to wait until the very last minute to order our banners. Then, I also had to scrap our plans to distribute bookmarks and sell posters at the event since I couldn’t find a printing service that could deliver those in time (the place I ordered the banners from doesn’t do posters or bookmarks). So, in order to get everything together, I had to borrow banner stands from a previous employer of mine, cover the banners that were already embedded in them with shower curtains (I couldn’t simply remove them because they were encased in the stand itself) and I also had to tape our own banners directly on the shower curtains. I also ended up having to buy some tablecloths that didn’t match the game’s colors, so it was all very great. However, once the whole thing was put together at the event, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t look pretty good considering the deadline and the means I had (did I mention I had to fly all of that equipment in from Canada?)

Not too bad right?

Then, for how the actual event went. I have to say; the whole thing was an absolute blast! I got to meet up with rj irl which was super cool. I also got to know a few other developers who had him make music for their games. Those games are called Unbeatable and Impact Resonance btw, and they’re both pretty great. I also want to emphasize that rj was working on three different games that got showcased at MAGFest. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person as prolific as him, which I’m sure will come handy for other aspects of this game, like marketing and publishing.

Another major takeaway from the festival was the metric ton of feedback I was able to gather from people on how to improve the game. Watching this many people play what I had of a game from start to finish was an experience I’ll never forget, even if it was extremely tiring to man a booth for close to 7 hours straight. I honestly think we got out of there with a much more solid vision for this project, which speaks volumes about how important playtesting is to any game. I’ve already organized all the feedback we got into a Trello board, which I’ll be working off of with rj to keep track of what we need to do from now on.

Another thing that happened is that I stayed up until like 3 am on the second night of the event making changes to the game on the show floor, along with the Unbeatable team who was working on their own updated demo. I would not recommend doing that ever

The whole thing went relatively smoothly from then on though, and I was able to let the demo run almost autonomously on the 3rd and 4th day. Then, at the end of the fourth day, I packed up my stuff, got back on my plane to Canada, and made it home at about 1 am on the night before I started University again! The next day was not a productive on, let me tell you that.

But on a more serious note, the entire event was breathtaking. I’m sure I haven’t done it justice just by talking about it here, but I’ll remember everything that happened in those four days forever, and I honestly think it was a life altering experience. I know people don’t usually mention this sort of thing, but I’m also very thankful that the circumstances I live in allowed me to even go there. Traveling all the way to an event in a different country where I showcased something I’d been working on for about a year and a half was a gigantic privilege, and I’d feel ungrateful if I didn’t mention how much I appreciate that this is something I could do, especially when not everyone is as lucky as I was.

Anyway, to end this recap of my MAGFest experience, I’d like to post a little video playthrough of the demo version of the game that was playable at the event since I feel like I’ve kept you guys in the dark long enough about the state of the game. So, enjoy some freshly baked gameplay footage:





Anyway, thanks for reading, and hopefully these updates get posted with a bit more regularity. And who knows, maybe in a few months I’ll have even more to say about other events and such!

Cheers!

 

In any case it looks like a great start! Huge fan of the color palette choice, and the "carry things around" gimmick sounds interesting. Hopefully this turns out great!

Hmm, yes, the GBA influence is strong, which is something I appreciate. Posting to follow!

This is lovely and has great potential. Keep it up!

Good name, but also that pixel perfect view pivot just begs a technical writeup on how you achieved it

Hey, so I finally finished this game! I'd put it on the backburner a few months ago after I got stuck on a puzzle, but I picked it up again today and was able to figure it out (mostly) on my own, so I probably just needed some rest at the time lol.

I just wanted to thank you guys for making such a great game with tons of humor and personality. Looking forward to your future projects!

Also, I noticed that there's some achievements I didn't unlock, so I'm guessing there's alternate ways of doing certain portions of the game? I'll try finding them if that's the case 

Nice! I especially like the moth one. She looks a bit regal in fact!

Looks like a good start on the camera system!

So, I went ahead and registered for the nand to tetris course on coursera, and the description of the first few weeks of the course is basically microhard, which is a game about specifying computer hardware with logic gates that I happen to have played a while ago. Unsure if the two are related, but it sounds like one of them is vaguely inspired by the other.

That blog series looks pretty nice as well! Hopefully I'll have the time to go through both of your links thoroughly.

And yeah, I heard that big compilers don't tend to generate their grammars for a variety of reasons. I guess if it was that complicated of a topic to begin with, then we wouldn't have come up with high level programming languages in like, the 50s

Oh, the first code sample is just random stuff from no particular language. It’s just the input I was using to test the tokenizer.

Also the language I’m using to make the compiler is C#. It’s surprisingly expressive for this sort of stuff.

Oh hey, this looks really neat! Thanks for the resource!

Hey, so as it turns out making a homemade tokenizer is actually pretty easy!

About a week or two ago, I set out on a series of experiments to try and make a small programming language, and I was able to implement a tokenizer surprisingly easily. I'd previously tried using tools to generate a grammar for me, but by doing it from scratch I've found that it's actually not as complicated as people make it out to be. Once you know the basic principle behind parsing text and matching patterns, it's actually even easier, at least in my experience, to write your own pattern matching functions than using regular expressions or a parser/lexer generator like bison and yacc. All it does at the moment is translate a source file into a series of tokens, but it's already pretty nice and the source code for it is surprisingly elegant. Here's some random text I fed it along with what it outputted as a result.

Code:

import "text.io";

if someCondition {
text.io.printLine "Hello world";
}

Code:

[import], ["text.io"], [;], [if], [someCondition], [{], [text], [.], [io], [.], [printLine], ["Hello world"], [;], [}]
Press any key to exit...

Needless to say, I'm pretty happy about this "first" foray into programming language programming. This language doesn't actually implement any behavior yet since it doesn't actually assemble tokens into an AST, but I think it's going to be relatively easy seeing how simple it was implementing text parsing routines

(btw I put "first" in quotes above because I've technically tried a few times to make a programming language, but this is my smoothest attempt so far)

 

I have a story where I found a legitimate compiler bug in vc++ involving method pointers and standard tuples, but I don't have enough time tonight to do a full write-up so I'll post about it tomorrow probably.

So you use frame interpolation then?