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[Retro]

The official devlog for



An adventure game for learning how to draw

I also like to call it a real-life skill RPG. Everything you learn and do in the game makes you better in real life.

The idea was successfully funded on Kickstarter and after a few months of getting settled into my new grad school lifestyle the development is underway.

Thus the devlog begins …


I finally took a bigger chunk of time to code something worth showing for Pixel Art Academy.

I started writing a custom sprite editor that will allow me to slowly go beyond what's possible with static images and/or existing tools. The first feature (reminiscent of color cycling/old-school indexed pixel editors) is quick color customizations of sprites, like so:

[Retro]

Small update, the indexed colors now have names so it'll be easier to know what you're changing.


Next up will be to add layers for different body parts and clothing items so that final characters can be composed of smaller pieces.

[Retro]

No new images, but my editor now has file selection, a pencil, an eraser and color picking! I'll skip the bucket for now. I consider these 4 the essentials of pixel art software. Well, I guess the bucket fill isn't as essential as I thought.

[gimymblert]

0x

[Retro]

I've been toying with the idea of 3D supported pixel art (pixel art with extra information about the 3D structure the image is trying to represent).

Similar to how art students learn about shading and shadow casting by placing a bunch of geometric bodies on a table and turning on different lights, in Pixel Art Academy you would have a virtual version of this. You would go pick up blocks at the art store on campus and bring them to your studio where you could make a still life scene on your table as a reference.

What's more than real life, you could put on your ZX-Vision glasses (in-game) and see in augmented reality how light rays hit the edges of the cube to calculate the shadow on the table.

As for the game graphics itself, having carefully, manually placed pixels, just like in all the art I did so far (the city, the studio), but there's extra 3D information stored so all the shading and depth sorting can be done dynamically and parallax is upgraded to real 3D when cameras move left and right …

[Storsorgen]

That's really cool Retro!

[Retro]

Thanks Storsorgen!

This update is not as spectacular, but still an important piece of the puzzle.



I'm testing language switching via Chrome's console. What you can't see from the GIF is that the texts are stored in a database and automatically updated everywhere as soon as there is change. Which means, if a translator fixes a typo somewhere, you would immediately see it fixed in your browser

[Retro]

And now the @Pixel_Dailies themes appear in the calendar!

[voltaicore]

If you need an audio engineer or audio producer be sure to message me so we can work something out for this project

[Retro]

Thanks, I already have that covered.

[GSquadron]

This looks like an amazing idea! I cannot wait to play the game!

[Retro]

I played around with Unity today for one of my classes. The game is not being made in Unity, but I just used the opportunity to test out the animation system I have in mind. The scaling is far from pixel perfect so it's full of ugly double-pixel artifacts, but the gist of the idea is there and it works quite well. Not that the animations are a high priority, but it's interesting to explore it as part of the class.

[Retro]

Another prototype thing with Unity, pixel people walking around campus.



They use A* to find their way around on the pathways (encoded into an extra bitmap):



Green channel holds the walkable areas, blue are the spawn points.

[Zorg]

And what's their destination? It looks very good!

[Retro]

They just go to another spawn point. There are some extra shades of blue I haven't had time to implement yet (airship landing, airship waiting space and subway station), however there are also hangout spots which will be the intermediary destination between the entry and exit spawn point.

[Retro]

I was at a hackathon this weekend and I brought the user accounts/character creation closer to completion.



Now I'm adding artists/artworks database parts so you will be able to upload works.
In this regard, I've spent most time setting up infrastructure:

• Meteor Galaxy for the hosting service
• MongoLab for hosting the database
• SendGrid for emailing (verifying emails so I can match it to your Kickstarter email and give you the correct rewards)
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) for uploading artworks
• Sign in with Facebook/Twitter/Google

[Geoff Moore]

I was confused about what this was until I read through the Kickstarter, haha. The whole project looks amazing, can't wait to see where it goes. Keep up the incredible work!

 

[Retro]

Good point, I'll edit the top post to include at least that it's a game for learning how to draw.

[Retro]

Just a small update on the walk cycle. It's probably a bit too twitchy now and I need to pay more attention to make things symmetric between left and right step. But it's an improvement and that's how it always is, practice, revise, slowly get better.

Also, excuse the anti-aliased rendering, I recorded the gif straight from the animation tool (Creature). Later it will be specially rendered with care in the game engine.

[Retro]

Final animation test:



Quite happy with Creature so far, it's close to the Prince of Persia rotoscoped feeling I was going for, well or at least it'll get close once I animate some more and get the feeling for this. But good for now. Moving on to more mundane things like artwork uploading …