Drew the last portrait. I do like how the shading and textures worked out. Will have to try similar techniques with the prior two human characters. The mage especially is very flat in comparison.

When it comes to the design it sure is a bog standard witch. Used this image as a reference for the face and this one for the dress. The striped pants and sleeves are just generic witchery.

One more week for graphics and campaign; one week for audio; one week for polish. I really need to plan the rest of the project carefully.

Cheers!

Felt like the least productive day of the production, yet that is mostly due to working on smaller things. Made the initial draft of the second boss battle. Same mechanics overall with destroying corruptors being the key to victory this time. Should do even if a tad derivative.

Tweaked things, added an auto-pause visual (that's been a while coming), wrote the rest of the prose for the first boss battle ending (5 variations with further small differences. Really it is just a few lines, nothing fancy).

Not exactly happy with the progress so far. There are a lot of small things to do and they take more time than expected!

Tomorrow's for the last portrait (the Witch as mentioned). Then starting next week I need to create some world graphics too (props etc.) and finally implement the assets in all the levels.

Cheers.

(Exoskeleton not pictured, it does not exist yet!)

The rough cut isn't quite done. Spent the day implementing the tutorial level for the new characters. It is unpolished, but finished for now. Then fixed issues in the boss level and nearly got all the transition prose in too. You get different dialog depending on who is corrupted and who is still alive. There are quite a few combinations there.

I am slightly worried about current progress. Only slightly though; a bit of pressure will do me good (yes?).

Cheers.

Something simple will do. Basically the witch flies to a random node, increases the corruption level after a delay and then repeats. Additionally more and more corruptors are popping up as time goes on.

Had to implement the witch properly as part of the world model, otherwise her current position and movement trajectory would not be saved. Got clever with the movement system. The model only stores the end position and the percentage of the way there (50% is halfway, etc.) It is the view who can then embellish the current trajectory any way it wants, for instance using a spline to do loops.

Also tweaked small things here and there. Tomorrow I'll try to put the campaign together, in a rough cut kind of way. Still missing the second boss fight, a tutorial for the new characters and an ending of course.

Cheers.

Having a break from the portraits. Instead implemented the witch in the world first. She flies around on a broom, following a spline. I'm using a slightly modified version of a free spline package by Catlike Coding who has a whole lot of other quality tutorials too. Worth a look.

Additionally got more prose in for the tutorials concerning the witch of course.

First boss battle tomorrow. I gotta jump on that as time is ticking out. The witch will be flying around a bunch in it, so everything should be in place... except for inspiration.

Cheers!

The pixie is done for now. The flat shaded green skin does look a bit off so that'll need rethinking. Used this image as inspiration for the dress (if only I could draw that well!) No idea who the character is or from where, a random internet reference.

Made 6 expressions for now,  those up top are normal and angry. Might need one or two more depending on how much of the dialog I get in. Another random internet reference that I used for the expressions is this one by Sharpie91 (could not find the original anywhere).

Righty-o. That's 60% done. One more portrait to do next week (the witch!) Will use the rest of the week for the boss battles and hopefully putting the campaign together for good. The extra characters also need world graphics... It is going to get tight.

Cheers.

Humans! Kind of in a fantasy sense. Needed a reference for a rad jacket and the first image popping into mind was who else than Roy Batty (Blade Runner). What I ended up with is not quite the same. Black didn't work taken she's supposed to be the silver mage and I didn't bother with all the detail.

Decided to try the hairstyle too while at it. Works alright. That's a double dose of Rutger Hauer then. Also, baldness avoided.

Two expression should do for this character. She has some altercations with the fox, but is mostly neutral.

Tomorrow's for the pixie. She needs quite a few more expressions.

Cheers

Couldn't quite put in the full hours yesterday or today, so will need to undergo more overtime in the future. Did manage to achieve both major tasks though so it isn't all too bad.



First the shape shifter portrait. Simple, maybe too bland at the moment. Took pose reference from Faust (Guilty Gear). A friend commented on how it does look a bit like Thing (Fantastic 4). Yeah, did not think of that did I? Might change the color later and there sure won't be any pants!



This here is the fox then. Turned out pretty ok. My brush work is sloppy, but it does not show much when scaled down. Pose reference.

Also implemented portraits in the dialog system. They pop up whenever someone has something to say, which is not very often at the moment. Will have to find time for those too. Tough.

Cheers.

Started on the two humanoid characters. Well, testing out some styles based on random references off the internet. Trouble with hair! Usually when I run intro trouble I find a way around it, so ah... expect baldness.

Not committing to the human characters yet, I need some more practice. Instead the other characters take priority. Here are the "civies" (need a better name for them)


Made them dance just for fun... Might sneak that animation in somewhere anyways.

Cheers!

Having made a few local multiplayer competitions (unpublished unfortunately) in the past I can see the potential here. Judging by the prototype getting the laser up and running first seems quite powerful, after all you can plop it down pretty much anywhere. It is possible to build defensively (successfully that is)? Does the laser run out of energy? Planned any more level layouts? How about other block types?

Supcom sure is a fine inspiration for just about everything, even if in the completely other end of the RTS-spectrum. Go seems like a good fit with its complexity stemming out of simplicity, always a good motto that.

"Use metrics and feedback to inform the design"
Not a bad idea. Just keep your hands on the wheel and don't get sidetracked by guesswork or requests.

Good luck! (alternatively: Do well!)

50% there. Feature complete, more or less. Watch the video for details and a showcase of the current progress.





Didn't do much earlier in the day. Some cleanup and bug fixing.

Graphics for the next three weeks. Hopefully I'll manage.

Cheers!

Temp graphics strike again!

Got the brilliant idea of mashing continue campaign, new campaign and past campaigns all on the same screen so that there is no need for a separate high-scores/history menu. No doubt this has been done before, but right now I cannot remember an example. Works for me.

Didn't get to level design yet. It took a while hooking up the serialization to the menu. It does work now and even the advanced options, which there are going to be more of in the future, are serialized with the save file.

Streaming tomorrow. It's been a while.

Cheers.

The corruptors can be destroyed now, also showing off the electric attack. Graphics are very much temp as you can see.

Also trying out the extra mechanic I though about back on Day 8. Basically a single use item to remove all corruption on a node. This ability combined with the new powerful characters allows me to mix up the levels in the second half of the campaign. Hmm, those will be fun to design.

Tomorrow's for initial menus and probably a few of those levels. Will work Saturday too, to make up for last Friday and Monday, and stream about the project progress on Twitch at 17.00 UTC as per the plan. Alpha is wrapping up!

Cheers.

Thought about the characters a bunch. The exo, copter and tank ideas stay, but the mechanics needed some changes.

Most of the ideas I went though did not fit in the current rules and setting at all. In the end I decided to give the copter unit an extremely powerful attack, the ability to destroy a corruptor! Once destroyed corruption on connected noes does not increase any more. Of course if a node is connected to two corruptors then there is no change.

The tank will have to do with a one range attack. Two nodes is too far as the maps are small. I also wish to avoid having to refactor the attacking code too much. The exo unit is melee, but also blocks corruption. The node they stand on can reach 100% corruption, but won't succumb until the exo moves away. I don't exactly know if this changes much, but we'll see once I get the mechanics in proper and make a few test levels.

Cheers.

A few days off sure did wonders, feeling energetic. We made this at GGJ, a bit of nostalgia for anyone who lived through the nineties.

Back to work. Made 5 levels and added more detail to the shifter sprites. Then some design.



Thought about the three extra characters I'd like to add. The current ideas: an exoskeleton (fast, weak combat ability, can save civies?), a gyrocopter (flying, slow, some sort of powerful corruption clearing bomb ability?) and a tesla tank (two-range electric attack or two simultaneous short-range attacks).

These would be easy to implement, yet they aren't that different from the current characters apart from being more powerful. I'd prefer the mechanics to change dramatically. Will need to look at references for inspiration tomorrow. Drawing blanks.

Cheers.

Another one of these days. Nothing ground-breaking, some dialog, some graphics. That there is the shape-shifter with a corrupted heart. They do look a bit like this boss from Megaman 1, now that I think about it. Hmm.

Mostly wrote in to comment on the next few days. Won't have a lot of time for work tomorrow due to Global Game Jam starting up (it's good to take a break from the project by jumping onto another project!). There's travelling to be done.

Next Monday is also mostly spent on other, unrelated, things unfortunately. Will work in these days on some future weekend.

Next week will be for finishing up the first part of the campaign. Basic menus too.

Cheers.

Did some research and stumbled upon this page, which I remember reading some years ago for the very same reasons. The first easy solution, presented in one of Unity's own videos, is no good. Constantly switching the sprites of multiple characters in LateUpdate is not a pretty or performant solution.

As luck would have it the most recent addition to this thread yielded an intriguing repo by RetryEntry. The idea seemed too good. Use a custom sprite shader which allows swapping the texture used by the SpriteRenderer. That's all it takes! Inspired by this made my own version with cleaner code, small improvements and an example scene to boot. Here's the repo for that.

Rather pleased of the code side of things, if only making the spritesheets would have turned out to be easy too. So far I'd used individual images exported directly from Krita. As someone familiar with GIMP's countless options and plugins I expected Krita to have similar export functionality too, but no. It does not even have scripting support yet so no help was going to come from there either.

To create the following spritesheets I had to individually export each image from Krita, download the following Fuse layers filter for GIMP, import the images as Layers and lastly run the fuse filter. To make things worse GIMP started crashing after using the filter for no apparent reason. Restart helps, sure, but it's still annoying especially after cursing at Krita for a while (both programs are otherwise splendid, so I can't stay angry for long!)



Needless to say I won't be constantly updating the spritesheets due to this pipeline issue. Monkey work is best done once only, when everything else is in place.

Last thing of the day: added the first "reactive" dialog into the levels themselves. Unsurprisingly it happens when the foxy gets corrupted. I need to come up with a lot more of these at some point now that I've gotten the tools in place.

Cheers.

Some days are not for big things. Tweaked the GUI, fixed some bugs, more dialog for the tutorial levels... Nothing to write home about. Lastly added simple "death" animations for the characters. Here's the fox after taking a hit.



Poor fella.

Realised that if I do want to add corruption visuals to the characters, and I do, the animator controllers need to be copied multiple times per character. One of the worst parts of Unity for 2D is the lacking spritesheet support. Swapping out the sprites of a character in an animator just isn't going to happen. There might be a third party solution for it, will look into it tomorrow.

Cheers.

The prose (dialog) system is one from the distant past, something I made for another project all together and have kept up to date through out the years (one major rewrite, lots of refactoring). It has many useful features even for the rather simple needs of this project.

Here's a quick rundown of the data files of the system and how they work, with completely made up examples.

You can define variables in a VariableList:

Code:

VARIABLELIST MAIN
 Name = Jethro
 RiskOfRain = 80
 PaidRespects = true

Text is stored in Data objects:

Code:

DATA Intro1A
 "It was all well and good until the rain came pouring down."

DATA Intro1B
 "The cemetery was spooky at night, but #Name# had yet to press F"

And lastly the most fitting data object is selected with Actions:

Code:

ACTION IntroAction1A
Requirements
 RiskOfRain >= 50
Data
 Intro1A

ACTION IntroAction1B
Requirements
 RiskOfRain < 50
 PaidRespects = false
Data
 Intro1B

There are other nifty features too, such as text randomization and inline logic in Data objects. Will come in handy if and when the inspiration to complicate things eventually comes knocking!

It did take some time to get the system running in MonoDevelop. I originally developed it using Visual Studio on Windows, you see. Had to change the target framework for each separate solution (three in total) and remake the unit tests using NUnit. Mono does output proper DLLs it seems as Unity has no problem with them. This should be future proof enough!

Implemented a short intro dialog in the first tutorial level. Nothing to show yet, but at least data loading and parsing work, as well as the simple text panel.

Cheers.

Those spaceships, especially the medium sized ships, look mighty fine! There's a surprising amount of variation to them despite the seemingly small set of parts. Simple color variation does wonders too.