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[Ninja Dodo]

Found this on twitter. Looks cool! Always love to see traditional 2D animation in a game.

[flipswitchx]

Animation looks dope! 

[Pehesse]

Found this on twitter. Looks cool! Always love to see traditional 2D animation in a game.

Animation looks dope! 

Thanks a ton to you both :-D

For this week, I have more gifs of the same moves as last time, Warrior flavored!









The challenge in this whole exercise was to figure out similar-lenth motions for both characters that still reflected their different attitudes, themes and energy. Hopefully those moves convey their characters well enough!

As far as planning goes, this covers all of the initially planned moves for the game, which means I can now focus on tweaking their feel and polish, before being able to start building the game proper using all of these individual blocks. It's about time! :-D

[Pehesse]

Here's something slightly different for a change!

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome so far has been communication with the team - since I'm not working alone anymore, I need to find out ways to communicate and clarify intentions, and have better platforms for discussion and iteration than simple wishlists.

To that end, I've "storyboarded" the game, meaning a series of sketches to illustrate current intentions for backgrounds and level design (so not *actual* backgrounds and LD, rather the general idea of what they could/should be), in conjunction with a description sheet with detailed intentions about level themes, mechanics taught and used, types of enemies present and bosses, and musical direction.




Time and use will tell if those are actually useful tools in the long run, but it certainly helps me clarify some of the unformed thoughts I had floating around, and get a better sense of what the game should (will?) be :-D

I'm now taking a small break to recuperate from those active last few weeks (ideally to rest, potentially to work on other unrelated things and projects, some I'm beyond excited about if they pan out) - I was rushing a bit to prepare for supposed april deadlines which won't happen now, so I'll instead start on the new animation marathon and clean+color all the latest Inti and enemy moves, much as last year, so expect a number of months of straight animation updates as soon as I'm back. Until then, if you have any questions, feel free to ask away :-D

[oxrock]

Here's something slightly different for a change!

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome so far has been communication with the team - since I'm not working alone anymore, I need to find out ways to communicate and clarify intentions, and have better platforms for discussion and iteration than simple wishlists.

To that end, I've "storyboarded" the game, meaning a series of sketches to illustrate current intentions for backgrounds and level design (so not *actual* backgrounds and LD, rather the general idea of what they could/should be), in conjunction with a description sheet with detailed intentions about level themes, mechanics taught and used, types of enemies present and bosses, and musical direction.




Time and use will tell if those are actually useful tools in the long run, but it certainly helps me clarify some of the unformed thoughts I had floating around, and get a better sense of what the game should (will?) be :-D

I'm now taking a small break to recuperate from those active last few weeks (ideally to rest, potentially to work on other unrelated things and projects, some I'm beyond excited about if they pan out) - I was rushing a bit to prepare for supposed april deadlines which won't happen now, so I'll instead start on the new animation marathon and clean+color all the latest Inti and enemy moves, much as last year, so expect a number of months of straight animation updates as soon as I'm back. Until then, if you have any questions, feel free to ask away :-D

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I think visually representing your thoughts really helps clarify what you mean and is definitely suited to someone with your talents. I've always been a solo act so I really have no other insights to offer.
Oh, and your stuff looks amazing like always.

[Pehesse]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I think visually representing your thoughts really helps clarify what you mean and is definitely suited to someone with your talents. I've always been a solo act so I really have no other insights to offer.
Oh, and your stuff looks amazing like always.

Thanks a lot :-))
Yeah, when I was working solo, this wasn't an issue, so I didn't get into the habit of doing it, but in retrospect, this probably could/should have been done sooner to help both the programmer and composer... especially since for Honey I had a clear idea of what I wanted the soundtrack to be like, but I'm a lot more unsure for Pacha, so having visual material to work with will hopefully help the others, both to see what I have in mind, and discuss/iterate/have ideas of their own from there. We'll see if the plan works out. The next step is to do more intention illustrations of "what could be" as I did when I first started working on backgrounds, maybe I'll do a few before jumping straight into xleaning animation. Depends on the shortest term needs at the time!

[Pehesse]

Finally, the dreaded time hath come: it's a new animation cleanup marathon! You know what that means: months on end of just animation compilation gifs... hopefully you aren't tired of these yet :-D



But that's not all! I've also started working recently with an awesome illustrator with a knack for monster design, Emilie Parthouneau, for the enemies' visual designs and concepts (based on their intended mechanics and textual design), and I'm happy to showcase the first few to come out of this:






We're still working out exactly what common elements need to appear, how the general enemy structures and proportions should work, etc, and I'll of course reinterpret those as I'll need to animate them in the end, so some of the smaller detail might be reworked, but I'm very happy with the general direction so far.
It's a tremendous help, as creature design isn't my strong suit, so I'm very glad and thankful to have such strong indications to work off of for animation!

If you want to check out more of her work, including the start of her own game, you can do so here: http://emilie-parthouneau.blogspot.fr/ !

[lithander]

That Panzerbär.... just WOW!

[Pehesse]

That Panzerbär.... just WOW!

I agree :-D There should be more coming soon enough!

For this week, more animation cleanup, you know the drill by now:

[Pehesse]

Animation cleanup marathon, week 3!



That's it for the Acrobat's new moves, now to clean the Warrior's, then color it all!

[Pixelologist]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Seeing your animations and their quality/progress are what has inspired me to make a 2D, hand animated,  game of my own. My other inspirations are Skullgirls and Battle Chef Brigade. Best of luck to you Pehesse!

[Pehesse]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Seeing your animations and their quality/progress are what has inspired me to make a 2D, hand animated,  game of my own. My other inspirations are Skullgirls and Battle Chef Brigade. Best of luck to you Pehesse!

Dang, thank you so much! I can't think of higher praise, so I'm not really sure what to add or reply to that. I hope you'll find 2D animation as interesting and rewarding as I do, and if you have any trouble, feel free to ask me what you think I may help you with, I'd be glad to help! (also, agreed, Battle Chef Brigade is pretty sweet :-D)

[Pehesse]

It's the Warrior's turn!

In more personal devlogg-y news, I was away last week (hence no update) for an eye exam and corrections that I hadn't done in more than 10 years (unbelievably, I could still see something after all this time). I've also fallen ill somehow, so this week was a bit rocky, and might lead to a few more ups and downs in the coming days, though hopefully mostly ups, blood tests will tell.

As for the game, progress is made on all fronts: the latest compositions by Morusque rock HARD and I can't wait for you to hear all of that in the game, Mad Spy is making good progress optimizing the current code and working on a special effects shader that (if it works) should be useful for a number of things, and Emilie as been cranking a few more concept illustrations, so... I guess it's all moving forward? Having done no updates in the past week makes me feel the world has moved on entirely without me, but thankfully the team's here to pick up the pieces, and... I'm not used to that weird feeling, to be sure! :-D Hopefully things will be back to normal now and I'll be back posting the weekly regularly scheduled animation gifs!

[Pehesse]

Another week, another recap gif!



And just for a change, here's some of the menu design I've been sharing with Mad Spy (in french, since we're both french) - we're mostly focused on functionality for now, I'll get around to menu aesthetics once I'm done with this latest animation marathon.

[slimehunter]

This looks really cool. I just discovered (popping up in my Twitter feed), and I'm excited to see progress being made. I'm sure I'll be playing this.

[Pehesse]

This looks really cool. I just discovered (popping up in my Twitter feed), and I'm excited to see progress being made. I'm sure I'll be playing this.

Thanks a lot :-D As you most likely saw, it's going to take a while before it's complete, but I'm pretty sure there'll be versions to play before all is said and done, so even if the wait will be long, there'll still be things to look forward to in a semi-decent timeframe, I hope! :-D

[Pehesse]

...aaaand done! This cleaning marathon is now over, onto color next!

[Pehesse]

Here's finally the start of the colored animation, without many surprises there:



I was a bit concerned that some of the moves relying on dynamic lines and sketchiness would lose some of their impact once colored and clarified, but thankfully, I don't feel that happened. There are still some tricky ones to color ahead, but those few were some of the ones I was most afraid of, so... a good step forward already!

[Pehesse]

It's coming along, slowly but steadily!

[Pehesse]

I hoped to be done with the Acrobat this week, unfortunately it'll have to slip over to the next week ever so slightly. Still, it's a bit earlier than planned, and you can expect some Warrior color next week!