Hey, sorry about the lack of updates in the last, uh, wow, 6+ months huh. To be perfectly honest, I had planned to wait a bit before posting updates so that I'd have a backlog of stuff to talk about, but I got busy with life (good stuff, don't worry) and I sorta forgot to post about any of it. But I'm making it up now, and I should have a post to publish here about every one or two weeks for the foreseable future!
Update #1 (Finally!): Player SpritesSo, before I start talking about the game proper, I'd like to get into a bit of where I'm going with the graphical style of this project, and compare it to their previous iteration in the old Game Maker version.
So, to start off, let's look at the main character, Serena:
So, as you can see, her first iteration's face was bit more rounded, and there's anti-aliasing between pixel clusters. Her feet were also much narrower, which didn't make much sense considering whe's running around a lot, and her hairstyle was also different due to the fact that, at that point in development, the inciting incident for the story was to have the aliens steal her hairband, which she would have gotten back at the end of the game. She also grew a few inches while the game was being made!
There's a few reasons for these changes. First, I wanted to make her silhouette a bit more defined and easily identifiable, so I gave her a better posture and a bit wilder hair, and I made her a bit taller so she'd take up more screen space. Second, while the anti-aliasing wasn't bad per se, it felt a bit inconsistent and messy in the places I did use it, especially on the face, so I decided to throw it out entirely and go with solid clusters of pixels with no AA in most cases. I feel like this gives it a bit more of a crisp GBAesque look, which is an aesthetic I can definitely get behind! Also, some of the AA was done with transparent pixels on the edges, which some purists might frown upon.
I also did a running animation, though I'm not going to go in great detail into why I made it the way I did quite yet because I intend to rework it for various reasons. I'll say though that I'm pretty happy with the ponytail flow in this one. Here it is, compared with its old version. There's a few other animations as well, but they don't read as well when not in motion, so I'd rather show them in action in proper game capture.
A more subtle detail with this design (and something rj came up with if memory serves) is the color scheme. The two main colors in this design are purple and yellow, and derivatives thereof. With purple and yellow being relatively underused complementary colors, I think this gives Serena qutie a distinct and contrasting look.
And that's about it for now! Sorry if this was a bit underwhelming after such a long time. I'll try to have some gameplay footage next time! And I do mean try, because, well, I'm in the middle of refactoring a bunch of technical stuff in the game right now, and all these changes somehow completely broke collisions with level tiles, so every moving object goes through walls right now.
Maybe I should rework this game to be about ghosts instead then
In any case, I'm working on this while working a full time job and making preparations for University, so I'll be a bit busy in the next few weeks. Again though, since I have a backlog of juicy technical details to talk about, I should be able to post here even if I don't manage to make much progress on the actual game.
See you in the next one!
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