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[Pixel Noise]

Really liking the art/animations.

[CleanShirt21]

Thanks guys! Yeah the camera shake has been hard to tweak, sometimes I am happy with it, sometimes I am not! I think I got it subtle enough now that it works well.

#Update 8



Lots of stuff behind the scenes. Been adding this quadruped as a new enemy, using a line renderer to draw the tail. Not quite content with the results, but it's getting there. Also have some automated elevator doors that open on proximity. Added mini health bars for enemies that pop up when you hit them, unfortunately I haven't set the offset value for this new enemy properly so it's almost out of the screen.

[CleanShirt21]

Update #9

Been adding an inventory system. It has been deceptively difficult to implement, I also added a little animation that the player does as you navigate the menu, but unfortunately I could not record a gif properly, I'd get all these distortions which I suspect come from all the colours in the background frame of the inventory screen. If anyone knows a better way to record Gifs under these circumstances it would be much appreciated!

[CleanShirt21]

Update #10

Added the fast travel / checkpoint device. The bonfire/lantern of this game.  I went back and forth on so many designs, even though conceptually I knew what I wanted from the start. I am going to do an annoying thing where they all return you to a hub area and then depending where you want to return to you have to go to a different section. I am doing this so the player is more compelled to explore the hub and see what may have changed since their last visit.

[keith.burgun]

I really like the color palette! If I had to nitpick I'd say that things in general are a bit too dark, but it looks good as it is.

[Tangleworm]

I'm really loving the fast travel effect! I thought the character was a witch at first because of the hat, but I'm curious to see how the "spaghetti western" angle plays out.

[CleanShirt21]

I really like the color palette! If I had to nitpick I'd say that things in general are a bit too dark, but it looks good as it is.

Thanks! Yeah I've been really trying to make my colour choices count, it's much easier to make things coherent when you limit your colour palette. The darkness of the game is something that I have had in mind since early development, to be fair though I think that the gifs and screenshots make it seem harder to see than it really is when playing the game without any other visual distractions around it. I always had a darker palette in mind for the backgrounds, which is why I came up with the concept of the all white enemies to really make them stand out. I think as long as the hazards and point of interests are clearly visible, the brightness and contrast of the game will pay off.

I'm really loving the fast travel effect! I thought the character was a witch at first because of the hat, but I'm curious to see how the "spaghetti western" angle plays out.

Funny you say that! Initially, when coming up with the first concept sprite, I was looking at references for witches' hats and outfits since I knew that I wanted the main character to have a big, identifiable hat. I would say that the biggest inspiration for the main character and the militia are the goons from the movie Looper. I always thought they were overly flashy in their dress, which makes sense considering they were based on toys.

[CleanShirt21]

Update #11



I finally solved a dilemma that had been bothering me for a while. I have always wanted to have enemies that were triggered at some point, yet that didnt spawn out of thin air. Originally I had a system where they would be in the background, with their sprite tinted darker to indicate so, and would move to the character layer and revert to a full colour tint when triggered. This looked like shit and I was never happy with it. I think this new approach works and looks much better.





Spent most of the past week implementing a new weapon. Scheduled 3 days for it and now I am on the 7th. Yay. I am trying to make all the weapons very distinct from each other, this spear is pretty much a projectile weapon though it is a main weapon slot. As you hold the attack button, you start charging your attack strength and the type of throw you do depends on when you let go. Also, you have to be in a reachable range from the spear to throw it again. I did provide an ability to reel it in from a distance by pressing the attack button, but it is pretty slow and I am trying to encourage the player to run up to it to pick it up. I am mostly finished, I just need to draw the animation for the charged attack (will just be a standard swipe, no special behaviour for it).

[Pixel Noise]

I like how the enemy appears - very cool animation! Will the bit of white mist on the ground at the start of the gif always be present (basically telegraphing where enemies will appear), or will the enemy appear from absolutely nothing, with that being the start?

[CleanShirt21]

This will only apply to enemies that are spawned on a trigger of some kind, the other ones will be fully formed. But yeah, for the ones that will be triggered it is like telegraphing them before hand in that sense. I dont really want to throw in enemies from nowhere, I've never liked that in games. On a 2D plane you are always more limited in placement of enemies and where they will come from, so I wanted to find a more creative way of handling it. I will also introduce a consumable item that lets you force the spawning of an enemy before the actual trigger is errr triggered. This way you can strategically take out enemies before like a dozen are spawned, or at least take out the biggest one without having to deal with the others!

[Pixel Noise]

Very cool - I think it will work well! Was just asking for clarity - not to suggest that it was a poor design choice 

[CleanShirt21]

I didn't get that impression at all, I just really like to over articulate my thought processes 

[CleanShirt21]

Update #12



Made tweaks to the spear, as additional playtesting revealed how cheap it was in it's initial deployment! You can still reel in the spear after throwing it, except if you do the maximum distance throw the chain will break and you will be forced to pick it up manually. Don't mind the speed of the gif, I was taking frames out of it when uploading it and it seems to have made it look super fast 



Also, this is what my animator class is looking like in Unity for the main character. I am starting to regret using the state manager and think that perhaps I should have just changed anims directly with animator.Play()

[CleanShirt21]

Update #13

Long while between updates! I wanted to make my whole process more efficient, now being much more comfortable in my development environment, but it required me to pretty much start a few things from scratch.
I set out two main objectives with the revamp, the first being that all characters have the exact same base, very customizable and modular, split into separate visual segments that would allow me to reuse and mix different character sprite sets sections.
My second objective was to create a general AI base that would require minimal overrides, where modifying a few variables related to the character's disposition would provide a wide range of behaviour that catered for most cases.

I am quite happy how those things came out, and will go into further detail about each of them in a later update. Another big thing I have changed is the name. I actually quite liked "Wrath and Justice" as a title, I kinda got the concept from War and Peace. However, I have recently learned that the proper pronunciation is closer to "Roth" then "Rath", and yeah it doesn't have the same ring to me! I am not 100% on this title either, though I quite like it and it describes the plot and setting of my game perfectly, I fear that it needs to be something with a bit more oompf..it sounds more like the title of a book.

Anyway, here are some gif's of the game now!

[Brandon Swan]

Really digging the ambience in those new gifs!
Feels very dystopic in a pretty inviting manner. Not like I want to live there inviting so much as I'd like to see more about this place.

[flex$]

love the atmosphere and art here dude. the feedback/motion with the melee weapons is superb but i think the guns need to provide more visual kick/feedback to the player to match those strong melee animations. keep grinding!

[BusinessDogStudio]

I really like the environment in those new GIFs, and the animations look really nice, as almost everyone has already pointed out. One thing that may un-clutter that massive animator graph: depending on exactly how things need to work, you may be able to simplify things by having a lot of those states get transitioned to out of the "Any State" node, and then just have a different trigger assigned to each transition to let you pick which one.

[CleanShirt21]

Thanks guys! I think the reboot definitely improved things a lot.

I really like the environment in those new GIFs, and the animations look really nice, as almost everyone has already pointed out. One thing that may un-clutter that massive animator graph: depending on exactly how things need to work, you may be able to simplify things by having a lot of those states get transitioned to out of the "Any State" node, and then just have a different trigger assigned to each transition to let you pick which one.

Yeah, looking at that animator graph was probably one of the biggest reasons that I new I had to start a lot of things again. I was really still getting acquainted with Unity when I started this, and I didn't know better when it came to using the tools. I had to do one of those graphs for every single character, it was incredibly tedious!

Starting clean though allowed me to reuse a base animation controller, and my graph is much neater now and uses blend trees and sub state machines, which were required to ensure a wide moveset that could be replicated between characters. I can crank out characters so much quicker now, it's much more motivating, I only have to add them to the root animation controller, draw the relevant segments, and I am good to go.

[Pixel Noise]

Workflow and having a good, efficient process is important! If your workflow has improved, then that's progress!

I've always pronounced "Wrath" as "Rath". Google tells me that's how it's pronounced 

[CleanShirt21]

Yeah, workflow is everything! When you are repeating the same thing a thousand times, even saving 10 seconds really adds up, and you begin to cut corners out of laziness. At least, I find that's the case with me.

Google is wrong my friend! Hah, not exactly, I believe Wrath is typically pronounced 'Rath' in America, and mostly here too in Australia, but the proper British English pronunciation is Roth or Raw-th depending where you're from. It's a stupid reason to change the name, but I don't know, it really bothered me!