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[Ninja Dodo]

Recap continued : 2017-2018


Also in 2017, I reworked player sprites, separating parts so I can more easily change weapons or shields, or swap player characters.



Previously I brute-forced this by just creating a separate modified sprite set for Player 2, but this was quickly becoming unmanageable and sure to become even more impossible to deal with down the line, so it had to go.

2018

That year was fairly uneventful for the game. Aside from freelance work I was mainly busy developing the v29 update for Guppy on Steam and itchio, and getting the iOS version updated and working again after wrestling with the *nightmare* that is certificates and provisioning profiles for what seemed like forever.

Though the game disappeared off the App Store soon after, as I refused to keep paying Apple's ridiculous development subscription fee, so that may have been a waste of time and money... There will probably not be a Mac version of Hellas.


Things I did work on that year:

- Improved the switch between mouse and gamepad in the main menu
- Did some clean up and fixing having moved the project to GMS2, also learned new stuff.

The one major bit of progress I made was a first attempt at procedural trees, developed as part of the annual PROCJAM.




Given that much of the Ancient Greek landscape was forest I need a way to efficiently build a lot of trees for this game, and in a specific art style. Generating them from modular custom parts seemed like a good solution. So far I've got adaptable cypress trees. More work to be done, but seems promising.

[Ninja Dodo]

So 2019...

The stuff I am working on at the moment is mostly boring behind-the-scenes fixing and refactoring, so nothing much to show right now. Also building systems that will make it easier to develop the rest of the game, like importing dialogue and level elements from external files, more modular level construction and other improvements. I've also continued to work on procedural tree generation.

I'll be sure to post more updates when I have something interesting.

[jb]

Great setting, there can never be too many games set in the ancient world! It is cool that you have come back to it after such a long hiatus - though it looks like you have been chipping away. I haven't played it yet but all the different enemies look really interesting. The hydra looks especially fun. Procedural trees sound interesting, I like that you have sketched them all out first. Good luck with development!

[oyog]

Awesome to see you're still working on this. followed.

[Ninja Dodo]

Another brief update:

2020

I didn't make much progress on the main game last year, aside from some refactoring. I did however manage to make some progress with procedurally generated trees. I added dynamic wind, manual adjusting of trees and more different tree types, including fir and pine. While it's basically a toy at the moment, this will allow me to create the natural landscapes for the game later.





I also posted the existing current build (v25) on itchio.

[JobLeonard]

OMG, a 9 year old devlog that's still going that I somehow missed!

Subbed!

Also, those trees have a very convincing hand-drawn look for procgen graphics, impressive!

[Ninja Dodo]

To be fair I haven't been updating very frequently.

The trick with the trees having that specific style is that they're all built from hand-drawn sprite segments and the procedural part is how they are randomized and recombined. Eventually the idea is to make them in the black-figure style of the rest of the game. These sketches are placeholder art.

[Alain]

These procedural trees are super cool and I love the way your iterative development process becomes visible here and in your older posts, because you are not afraid to show placeholder art. Your placeholder art itself is beautiful, too, by the way