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[SolS]

Star Specter

Your mission is to infiltrate and dismantle the three major industries and to take out the leaders of each location for your "father".

Currently the three main stages planned are Agriculture, Medicine, and Construction





Here's a few early mockups









 
 

[SolS]

Making some progress here and there with various ideas/mechanics

[TonyManfredonia]

I 100% agree with the Atari as a similarity / inspiration. Particularly with the color palette. This is awesome!

[SolS]

Thanks! Someone made a Mega Man 2 Atari demake that's actually really well done. It looks much more like an Atari game but it still feels somewhere between Atari and NES which I found inspiring.

[SolS]

Made a bit of progress with the art in the agriculture stage, it's looking a bit more solid now.

[SolS]

Here's a few concepts for the construction stage including outdoor palette variations and some kind of compacting bulldozer idea.





Progress has slowed down quite a bit, I'm hoping to get back to working on Deep Greens pretty soon. I just want to add a bit more substance to this game, hoping to end on a high note somewhat, so that maybe that will make it easier to return to it at some point later on. Like if I can get a few decently full mockups for each level I'll be satisfied enough to move on for now. But if my progress and motivation for this game continues to be a bit lack luster then I'll probably move on very soon.

[stuffedwombat]

Oh wow, these look all really cool!

have you thought of adding a palette swap option, like in downwell for example, to this?

[SolS]

Thanks! And yeah I have considered something like that. I've been testing other palettes occasionally and I'm always trying to keep in mind ways I can include a variety without making too many similar variations. As for a palette swap option specifically I'm not sure how to technically do that other than creating an extra version of each stage with the changes so that might be a bit tricky to add for now.

Here's one of the color tests, a few bits from the three stages combined into one stage to see how they'd look in that color. This might work nice for some final stage after the first three but like I said I don't want the variations to be too similar to things you already see in the game, it's hard to resist using the alternate versions for at least something though. They're actually pretty useful for determining what potential changes I may want to make to the levels. The main goal though is to add more graphics to each of the stages so I won't be so tempted to recycle and re use what I already have.

[RofB]

I normally don't like nes/atari era pixel art, as I've always thought it looked a bit crap.

This on the other hand looks great, something about the palette choice just really does it for me. And it also helps alot that your sprite work has a nice amount of variation in it.

[SolS]

Thanks! Everything about the description, including the title of the game, is a bit misleading. I'd imagine a game called star specter to be some kind of space shooter game. And maybe the description should have just been 8-bit pixel or something though at this point it probably doesn't matter much.

I always liked how much colorful sprites really popped out against black backgrounds, which was of course very common in older games, kind of like a black light effect. So I always try to include a lot of that in what I do without a lot of the other system restrictions.

[SolS]

Got a start on another part of the background, closer to one of those greenhouse domes.



Also made a quick mockup to see how the water (medicine water) would look. Underwater the background is removed and the fg takes on the color of the bg, I'd do the same for the agriculture stage with the blue colors. Readability might be a bit weird but hopefully the player would get used to it fairly quickly, especially in motion with the bubbles floating up and the water's surface being animated.

[SolS]

I haven't really been working on anything lately but I'm hoping to get back into things a bit.

Here's a mockup I made today reusing some art. I've really been limiting myself trying to make 3 completely separate levels so I'm going to experiment a bit more with recombining art. I'm still hoping to have at least 3 distinct levels but I want to see what else I can come up with and try to make it fit into the game as well.



Here's an older mockup which turned out a bit too mono colored. The background can still be good for something but I'll want to make a foreground that stands out a bit more.



And here's some character portraits for some location bosses I made previously. I'm thinking I'll come up with something more interesting for each later on. Like a protective chemical suit for the agriculture boss and a doctor's masks for the medication boss. These would mainly be used for a mega man styled level select but I'd also want to use them for some text boxes within the stages, I thought it would be cool to have the bosses talk to you like in star fox or talk with each other like in kirby super star's meta knight's revenge

[nathy after dark]

I love the tentacle monster/squid thing.

[SolS]

Thanks! It originally was an octopus statue from an rpg like project I was working on. Early on when making this game the idea popped into my head that it could be interesting to try to make it work as a mini boss so I decided to reuse it. Now that I'm thinking about it, working on finally animating it would be a great way for me to get the ball rolling on this game again.

Also here's a slight variation of the mockup from above. This time with more of a moon looking light in the sky but I'm not sure which version I like better at the moment. Also added a rocket launch site to the background. It's a bit busy and hard to read since I just crammed it into the current mockup but in a more open shot it could look cool.



I'm also considering either shrinking the screen size similar to a game boy game as seen in the mockup above, or making the player character slightly larger since he looks so small in the previous screenshots. Though making the screen size even smaller might make it hard to fit the octopus fight into one screen. Either way I'll probably figure that out quickly once I start working on animating the boss itself.

[Anxious Neck Games]

How far along is this? It looks awesome!!

[SolS]

Thanks! And not very far actually... But I was messing around with the window size a bit the other day it was looking really nice! Like I mentioned in the other devlog I'll hopefully be getting more time to work on these games somewhat soon here.

[SolS]

A couple weird mockups. Just experimenting a bit.

[SolS]

A couple more mockups

[TonyManfredonia]

Man, that color scheme is just SO GOOD! Do you reference anything? Or are you simply doing this from pure Atari reminiscence? 

[SolS]

Thanks! The blue and brown along with the two green shades I got from watching a youtuber play through dr. jekll and mr. hyde on the nes, the greens were the health bar and I recognized that they'd work as a cool militaryish looking palette. And the blue and brown were on the buildings, I've always loved that color combo since it's usually pretty uncommon to see.

There are a lot of color combos in games in general that inspire me since for the most part any two colors can work really well together as long as they're the right shade/hue etc and sometimes I see unusual combinations that really stick with me. That along with the contrast of having a lot of black which is common in older games but always make the colors pop really nicely.

Other than that the previous palettes have been mostly default ms paint colors that are sometimes modified. The limited palette at times makes me wish I had a 2nd shade for the foreground objects since there are a lot of color combos in older games I've always liked that are very nostalgic. Like for example in old nes games where they'd have grey metal with blue as the darkest shade rather than a darker grey.

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I'm getting surgery tomorrow which I'm hoping will help me with my chronic pains that I've been struggling with for years. If I can get any kind of relief I'll have more time and energy to focus on these games, and more importantly I'll be much more motivated and it will feel like less of a chore since doing anything with pain is of course physically and mentally draining even for the simplest things! Either way I'm really happy with the screen ratio of these last few mockups and I've got a better idea of what I want visually for this game!