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[Kersei]

Hi everyone, I'm here to talk about our game in development that is called The Grimoire of Yunuel.

The Game

The Grimoire of Yunuel is a 2D platformer with action and puzzles, bosses and magic.
In this game you control a knight that wants to protect his kingdom and the world from an evil wizard who wants to get his hands on the most powerful grimoire of the world.



Status

We started the development about 7 months ago, and we want to create a playable demo so we can get feedback, and if it's posible a crowfunding campaign.

What is done so far:

• Core Gameplay: movement and basic attack.
• 2 demo levels designed.
• 1 boss for the demo.
• Basic dialogs.
• Basic enemies.
• Basic traps.

The Team
Our team is form by two people, we both work part time on the game but we want to go full time with this when the time is right.

• Rafael Balbuena (me): Coder, level designer.
• Fernando Castillo: animator, artist

About the music, we're going to get a composer for that, when we have money to pay him.

More Info

My info:

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Tig Devlog

Team info:

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Website

Feel free to make suggestion and ask me anything.

[Kersei]

Hi, again I'll try to update this more often, but first I'm gonna show more of what we have so far.

The Mechanics

This game has basic platformer mechanics but we wanted to add more to the mix, so we implemented different things.

Fighting

From the very beginning you have a sword to kill the enemies, this sword uses magic to increase it power, it has four levels of power, level 0 and 1 are practically the same but with different damage.



Abilities

In addition to the sword our Knight will get new items by defeating bosses, these items consume your mana to give you temporary abilities.

Gloves

The gloves will temporary let you push bigger objects, and shoot magic from your hands.





Boots

The boots increase your speed and makes you jump higher.

(No image available yet)  

Armor

The armor will make you invulnerable for a few second.

(No image available yet)  

Hammer

The hammer will hit the ground, destroying things and causing a magic explosion around you.

(No image available yet)  

Collection

Across the levels there will be jewels and prisoners for you to find, if you find them all, you will get extra things to help you.





To find them you will have to get all the keys and find all the secrets paths.





Mana Levels

As you saw earlier to use your powers fully you will need to gain mana, the way to get it is to kill enemies, once you get enough mana you will gain a mana level.



And if you get hurt you will lose a level of mana, but you can try to recover it.



I think that covers the principal mechanics, I would love to see what you think of our game.

I'm gonna be around for sometime.

[Kersei]

Hi again, now I'm going to talk about the story.

The Story

A long time ago, in the realm of Viarkon a young child was born, this child was very powerful and in a very short time he became a wizard, his name was Yunuel, his power was beyond imagination and he could defeat an army by himself, he used his power to make of Viarkon the greatest realm of the world. When he felt that his work was done, he put all his power and knowledge in the most powerful grimoire of the world waiting that someday his sucesor will appear and continue with his legacy.

Two thousand years later, this is known as a legend, but a legion of wizards came from a far away land to get their hands on the book, so is the duty of the prince Keith to take matters in his own hands and make sure that the grimoire will not be used for evil.

The Characters

The Prince

Keith is the leader of the knights and also the prince, he has great respect and love for the reign and he will do anything to protect it and his people.



The Necromancer

The eldest member of the Legion of Orebach, is an old but powerful wizard that can bring the deads to life.

(No image available yet)  

The Elemental Wizard

The only woman in the Legion of Orebach, she is a young wizard that can control the elements and is very skillful.

(No image available yet)  

The Alchemist

The scientist of the Legion of Orebach, he is a mature wizard that uses potions and spells to destroy the things in his way.

(No image available yet)  

The Demonologist

The apprentice of the Dark Wizard, he is a very powerful wizard that uses magic to control Demons and make them to fight for him.

(No image available yet)  

The Dark Wizard

The leader of the Legion of Orebach, he is the most powerful wizard of the legion, he uses his dark magic to perform evil acts, he wants the grimoire to amplify his dark powers and dominate the world.

(No image available yet)  

Update (07/16/2016): Changed the image of Keith for the real sprite.

[Thirteen]

You finally posted it here! Hooray!
The game is looking great, there's so much done already that I didn't know (or better, I didn't stalk enough)
Keep going

[6down]

Off to a good start! I dig the skeleton's walk and crumple, reminds me of those old Disney shorts, except for the prisoner slice-that's a pretty dark gif  .  Looking forward to art for more characters, keep it up!

[Kersei]

Hi again, now I'm going to talk about enemies and stuff.

Enemies

So far there are 4 basic enemies:

Skeleton

This guy just walks around a little area and when he sees you he tries to hit you. After he dies, he leaves 2 mana orbs.



Frog

The frog it's practically the same that the skeleton but it jumps and tries to hit you with its tongue, sadly I only have a ugly placeholder for this.



Eagle

The eagle flies around from side to side and if you get in range it stops and goes after you, also has an ugly placeholder.



Slug

The slug walks around like the skeleton, but when it sees you speeds up towards you and after sometimes it explodes, placeholder too.



Worm

The worm just walks around a platform, it also has an ugly placeholder.



We also have more enemies planned, but this are the ones that exist right now.

Planned Enemies:

• Bat
• Turtle
• Little Skeleton
• Armor Skeleton
• Snake
• Gargoyle
• Golem
• Mummy

Bosses

The Bear

So far we only have the first boss that is a bear, and it also has an ugly placeholder.



Planned Bosses:

• Necromancer
• Elemental Wizard
• Alchemist
• Demonologist
• Dark Wizard
• Chimera
• Death Knight
• Big Golem
• Demon

That covers the enemies for now, hope that you like it so far.

[TonyManfredonia]

Woooooah! It has a distinct "Ghosts n' Ghouls" vibe. Well done! It's off to a great start; thanks for sharing on TIGSource!

[Thirteen]

Fugly bear is my husbando ♥

[Kersei]

Hi again guys, it's been a while since my last update so I'm here to talk about what we've been doing.

Bug Fix

These couple of weeks I've spent most of my time correcting bugs and improving things that needed to be improved, first thing that I corrected are the platforms, they had a little weird behaviour, so i took the time to fix them. Here is an example:



Before


Here you can see that the platform kinda dissapear.

After


Here that bug is fixed.

Another bug fix was the walk of the skeleton, now the skeleton stops when he can't walk anymore, here it is how that looks.



Improvements

Now with the improvements, I improve some things to make it look better or to make them give you more visual feedback, again most of this is a placeholder, the looks of the game will be different, but for now this is what I can show you.

Slug

I added explosion particles to the slug, so now you can see the explosion.



False Wall

I changed the false wall to now give it a grow effect, like the view is getting bigger when you enter the wall.



The Demo

We're working on a demo for you guys, of course that it's still in progress, we need to get rid of almost all the placeholder sprites, but we're in a good path right now, here is some epic draft of the title screen for the demo.




That is what I can show you right now, but i'll keep updating this, hope you like it so far.

[TonyManfredonia]

Solid changes made. Everything is looking well-improved! I particularly enjoy the expansive space for the hidden rooms.

[Kersei]

Hi again, it's been a month since my last update, sorry for that but we've been working on some things besides the game.

File System

Last time I told you about the demo so I put together a small file system for that, now you can have 3 different files to play the game, you can load the files in a screen and your game saves automatically everytime you finish a level.



Dialog improvements

The dialog system has been improved, now the text turns from transparent to black instead of adding letter by letter, visually it looks the same but we got rid of the words that change line when they don't fit.



New Enemies

I added two new enemies:

The Bat

The bat starts hanging on the ceiling, and when you enter its zone, it flies towards you and after a short time it becomes a rock, you can use that rock as a platform but after some time it returns to normal.


(Placeholder animation)

The Turtle

The turtle is immortal but you can use it as a platform to pass through some sections of spikes without dying.


(Placeholder animation)

New Trap

I added a new Trap that comes in two versions:

Single Electric Wall

The single electric wall consist in one emisor and one receptor, it enables and disables after some fixed time for you to pass through it.


(Placeholder animation)

Multiple Electric Wall

This wall functions like the first one but in this version you have one emisor and several receptors.


(Placeholder animation)

Sprites

Finally I can show you some of the real sprites of the character, for now I'll just show you two of the animations:

Idle



Running



That's all for now, see you in future posts, hopefully sooner than the last time.

[Kersei]

My god, it's been a while (more like a lot) since my last update, so let's get to it. First of all I want you to know that the project is still alive and we're still the same two people doing it. Since the begining of this devlog I wanted to do more technical posts and talk more about the process of the game instead of what is going to have.
So this devlog it's going to become a "how we're making a pixel art game on Unity devlog". But we're going to keep posting the updates of it, and I know that I always said this but I'll try to post more often.

So first let's talk about the current state of the game. Since the last update there have been some changes, mostly visual changes. The main character of our game looks very different. Take a look at the new Keith.



As you can see this new Keith is more pixely than the previous one, that's because this way he will fit better on our setup with the native resolution we chose.

Other thing that changed was the tiles of the game as you can see in this gif.



It all looks and feel better this way.

The Technical Part

So now let's talk a little about the problems of making a pixel art game in Unity. The first problem we faced was that Unity doesn't give you the option to make everything pixel perfect, so we had to go to the forums to learn a few things. First of all we needed to define how many pixels are per unit, so since our current resolution is 640x360 we went for 32 pixels per unit (PPU), this way we can have good space on the camera and everything looks great. To achieve this we used a script that was on the unity wiki (apparently it isn't there anymore), with that script we could set the PPU and made tests till we got to the desired look. Also we needed to set the same PPU on every sprite of the project.



So as we added the new tiles we noticed that it still looks pretty weird when the camera moved, so we realized that the Unity camera doesn't move at pixel level, it does a unit level, that behavour is really annoying when you are making a pixel art game, cause it can mess up the sprites pretty bad. So we went back online and we found this post that explains a workaround for that issue. Now after applying it the game looks like the gif I put before this.

Another problem we found was the pixel font, after the last Unity update it started to look weird so we went google again and found a way to fix it, basically we needed to change the configuration of the font by making it pretty big and changing the character set to a custom set, and then we needed to type all the characters we're using in the game.



This is all that I have for today. Hopefully this will help someone that has run into the same problems. See you on future posts.