next »

[Pixel Noise]

The old trees gave an impression of being taller, and added a sort of depth to the screen and world to my eye. You're right about the new ones - but they also seem smaller - they give me more of a feel of large bushes. Like, the other trees I felt the character could walk under - these, not so much. They are both good, just different effects.

Also loving the brunette hair 

[Aloft]

The old trees gave an impression of being taller, and added a sort of depth to the screen and world to my eye. You're right about the new ones - but they also seem smaller - they give me more of a feel of large bushes. Like, the other trees I felt the character could walk under - these, not so much. They are both good, just different effects.

Also loving the brunette hair 

They indeed are smaller.

The largest tree in the latest screen is in fact only 4 tiles wide, like the LTTP trees. The older screens featured an 8x8 tree, which I also plan to show soon, but didn't picture.

[Aloft]

Some really loose sketches of an overgrown town worn down to foundations:

[FrostyChao]

Hello! I really like the titleplate art and the overall style of the game. As for the inventory, I also think the light blue one is better.

The new character sprite looks great (it's not in the latest build, is it?)

Also, I have a question. I played some of the available build there and something about the controls is kinda bothering me. You are only able to move in one direction at a given time, even when pressing diagonals with an analog controller. Is this by design?

I'm asking this because the way diagonals seem to be very present in this game, it would certainly benefit if you could walk diagonally as in LTTP (snes zelda) as opposed to the way the nes zelda does. The nes zelda and this game both lock your current direction. Zelda gives up/down priority over left/right, while Hazelnut Bastille gives left/right priority over up/down.

It would also make it easier to kill the bats at the beginning of the dungeon I took a lot of hits because I couldn't move to the exact spot to hit them with the sword.

Other than that, it's progressing quite nicely, and you got yourself some gorgeous tiles. I look forward to see a new build with the new character sprite as well.

Good luck with the game!

[Eluardian]

Damn that's a nice update. Are you sure that's a loose sketch? 

[Aloft]

Damn that's a nice update. Are you sure that's a loose sketch? 

Yeah, sort of a progress shot. A lot of things I would do a bit differently, or put a bit more care into eventually; sort of like laying down shapes that loosely represent future assets, and how they might work, but not actually being those assets, you know?

[Aloft]

Hello! I really like the titleplate art and the overall style of the game. As for the inventory, I also think the light blue one is better.

The new character sprite looks great (it's not in the latest build, is it?)

Also, I have a question. I played some of the available build there and something about the controls is kinda bothering me. You are only able to move in one direction at a given time, even when pressing diagonals with an analog controller. Is this by design?

I'm asking this because the way diagonals seem to be very present in this game, it would certainly benefit if you could walk diagonally as in LTTP (snes zelda) as opposed to the way the nes zelda does. The nes zelda and this game both lock your current direction. Zelda gives up/down priority over left/right, while Hazelnut Bastille gives left/right priority over up/down.

It would also make it easier to kill the bats at the beginning of the dungeon I took a lot of hits because I couldn't move to the exact spot to hit them with the sword.

Other than that, it's progressing quite nicely, and you got yourself some gorgeous tiles. I look forward to see a new build with the new character sprite as well.

Good luck with the game!

Yeah, the latest build we offer is the prototype from about 50 days ago. We have added a lot since then (so there have been about 30 dev builds since then), but we put a lot of work into the public builds, to make them as close to the current game experience as possible, so they happen less frequently- we are planning on doing revisions to the character appearance sometime soon.

The four-way movement is very conscious. There are sort of special limitations that such a character controller has which  designers can exploit in special ways in enemy design; the world itself is going to heavily take the character movement style as a governing aspect in what sorts of geometries the various game spaces take; expect to see a lot of heavily rectilinear pathways.

We plan to have another build which allows the player to experience a lot of the new art and content sometime this Fall or early Winter.

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement!

[Aloft]

Ok, first image using overworld tiles in our engine (as opposed to in photoshop as before).

Will have to play with colors and contrasts a lot, but a decent start:

[Aloft]

Vote Your preference!



The last kind of rock walls, or these?

[Pixel Noise]

I like the first kind of walls - the second one looks maybe too much like Zelda to me. Plus, at least with the environment you've got going in the screenshot, I feel like the first wall fits better.

[Aloft]

Yeah, the second walls are partially based on the underlying theory behind the walls in Link to the Past.

I actually spent a pretty long time (5 days even) studying wall systems that top downs utilize, and I began to notice a few common themes and techniques.

The walls in that game do a particular set of things, and fit a certain family of situations; it is surprisingly hard to create a system of walls that solves those same problems without them looking significantly similar.

The main points you have to hit: the walls needs to change their general shading everytime they round a 45 degree corner to show faceting; you need a lot of rythmic horizontal banding that continues around corners to make them more legible; you need something which can stack well in the vertical dimension for higher walls.

If you want to do walls in a general 3/4 style that turn corners in the same perspective (like the first walls), you have a lot more options, and they are thus easier to make distinct to your art style. The one thing that seems to help that style is beveling the edges of the sides and back to show the walls have mass in the non-frontal views, which was a device that Minish cap used, and has been in vogue since then.

[Garmy]

I like the second walls better, but I could see the first type of walls in different environments like a beach, jungle, or desert.

I feel like the first walls are more 'busy' than the second, and would generally do better in an environment with less detail in other assets or fewer assets in general.

[Aloft]

The second walls do have the benefit of reading as a symbol, and not stealing your eye away from whatever action might be happening on the screen.

[Eluardian]

I prefer the first walls and feel that they fit better into the world you've shown so far, but I prefer the way the second blend into/ out of the grass. I wouldn't particularly question either of them if they were both in-game though.

[Kyle Preston]

Second set is easier on the eyes, first set is more interesting and spacious. I vote first set!

[Aloft]

Thought this was neat... This is the system I used to make the foundations for the earlier images, and which I will use as the foundations of the homes in the settlement to be made shortly. There are so many because there are are both 2 and 3 row tiles, and a few of the irregular ones are made for being placed at multiple heights. There are also a few for tiling seamlessly for making rows of custom width, terminal pieces, and lintels and headers (the way an ancient person would have constructed a door or window).

Some of the higher irregular pieces may actually be implemented as floating sprites in the scene, where the pivot determines its depth in the render stack, similarly to the way we handle enemies right now; that may be necessary due to the fact that the player must render both in front of and behind the same tile for some of them in order to make spatial sense depth wise, based on where they are in the room. We also have a "floor" system for handling issues like that (especially in the dungeons), although this problem might be easier to solve with the sprite system.

[Aloft]

Did a quick little massing house, to study how the roof angle will affect how the images of the homes in the settlement lay out in two dimensions. I know from having done this sort of 3/4 view many times for other reasons, that you end up getting mostly roof in these angles, but I guess we can find ways to make that interesting.

[Aloft]

Annndddd.... this is how it translates into pixel land:

[KevinTillman]

Annndddd.... this is how it translates into pixel land:

design and colors are nice!

[Aloft]

Sort of funny how the background midtone I used is the same seafoam-green you used on your avatar

It seems to be a pretty common color for drawing out the contrasts in pixel art for some reason...