Choosing colors for this game was really hard for me, because I'm slightly red-green colorblind. I decided to use https://coolors.co/app, which is based on actual good art, and keep the three-color combinations that I liked. That was a very long process, took maybe 10 or 15 hours total, with a lot of artistic critique from my family. Eventually I ended up with seven palettes, plus one grayscale palette for the very beginning of the game. Here's a couple that were also good but didn't make the cut:

While we're on the topic of audio, the game over sound in the game is a fragment of a free sound taken from here: https://www.freesound.org/people/feveran/sounds/59003/

It's the sound of a vinyl scratch, though the music in the game is a tracker song that would never be on vinyl. This mixing of metaphors is deliberate and I have more such ideas for later :-)

The song in the game is Quazar's "Funky Stars", you can hear it here:





Quazar is the demoscene alias of a well known DJ, but I don't think he'll come after me for copyright, because a) all music released under the Quazar name is apparently public domain, b) this song originally became popular when it was used in a crack for Worms 2 :-)

My version of the song is different from the version on YouTube, because I've cut out the repeated part from 1:06 to 1:50. Given the ultra hard nature of my game, no one would ever hear the awesome part after 1:50 unless I moved it earlier.

Making the cut and splice precisely while keeping the beat turned out to be pretty hard. I tried Audacity first, but it didn't give me a beat grid and couldn't save an MP3 without going through some crazy instructions, so I gave up. Next I turned to FFmpeg, but it started inserting 0.12s pauses at the beginning of every MP3 it saved, because apparently that's how things work. I couldn't live with a stuttering splice, so eventually I wrote a shell script that cuts out the required parts in WAV, trims them down to size, concatenates them, and converts back to MP3.

The end result is here: http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/itchio/html/239738/hybrid-edit.mp3. The cut is around 1:06.

For example, here's a fun thing I did last night - added support for capturing screenshots and animated gifs directly in the game. (It's not in the public version yet, but I'll upload it when it's more presentable.)

To make animated gifs, most people use screen recording software and then convert to gif. I don't like that workflow because it's hard to keep a consistent framerate throughout the chain, especially if you're capturing on a 5 year old laptop like mine. Since my game uses HTML5 and Canvas, I wondered if I could just dump the canvas state at successive frames, encode it as a gif with JavaScript, and stuff it into a data URI.

Turns out there's already a library for the hard parts: https://github.com/antimatter15/jsgif. Though if I try to encode on the fly, even with a tiny size of 480x300, everything slows to about 3 frames per second. But if I build up a buffer of ImageData objects and encode only at the end, the game plays normally, though the encoding step takes a couple minutes.

Implementing the whole thing took me about an hour. Right now, in my home build of the game, pressing S instantly opens a screenshot in another tab. Pressing G starts recording a gif (at a fixed framerate of 60fps) and pressing G again stops recording and opens the gif when it's done. Then I just upload it to imgur, that's how I got the gifs above :-)

I started making this game two weeks ago:  http://vladimirslepnev.itch.io/zigzag




Making a game turned out to be a much more exciting and varied hobby than I expected. There's a lot of good feedback from people on Reddit, Facebook etc. and I'm updating the game almost every day. Here I'll be posting about the details of development, because I'm really itching to share all the interesting tasks that have come up.

The carnivorous grass reminds me of "Harzak" by Moebius:



http://pdsoasis.github.io/arzachcomics.html

Yes indeed! We've been working with the extremely talented Del http://deldraws.tumblr.com/ for a couple of months now, and have some Big Plans in that direction. These just are some of the early pose sketches shes done for us so far:

If you want a high-res concept of the slugcat, IMO there's a lot of room for improvement. The shading is very coarse, the 3D shape of the face looks off, and I'm not sure that a slug-like tail can ever look good in high-res (as opposed to a furry tail).

May I suggest doing a Google image search for "ermine", and using it as a reference for some of the trickier features?