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[Biijii]

I've been making the game prettier.

Background Colors
They've been so bad for so long.

I finally got rid of the "Toddler Clip Art" aesthetic, and made the colors blend together a bit better. This mostly meant making the colors all a bit warmer.

Now I have this problem where every time I look at it, I think the colors need to be tweaked more, but then after an hour of tweaking things look exactly the same. I feel like things are a bit too dark overall, but when I try to lighten one part it throws everything out of whack. If I try to up the overall exposure the colors don't blend as well.

Guess I'll just embrace the warm comfy aesthetic.

Chopping Particle Effects
I started by taking a screencap of a katana chopping through some bamboo, and sketching ideas over top of it in Photoshop. The only thing that looked good was this pointed star.

I messed around with the scaling, opacity, and rotation until I found an animation for the star that worked. It was okay, but kind of boring, so I added a Unity particle system and found that having little trails shoot out of the particle looked good too. Using a similar process I also made some wood particle effects for my wood obstacle.

It doesn't feel perfect, but it gets the job done. Not too overstated, but still feels more satisfying than without particle effects.

Switching to Unlit Shader
Finally I changed all my obstacle materials from the standard shader to an unlit shader. I've been meaning to do this for awhile. The standard shaders didn't mesh with the background very well.

This meant figuring out how to make an unlit shader that has the ability to fade (luckily found a solution online), and going back through all of the textures to tweak the colors. I've done one pass through all of the textures, but some of it feels slightly off, so I'll need to revisit a few.

Final Thoughts
With release inching closer, I want my game to look good as soon as possible. The earlier it looks better, the longer I can market my game effectively. In future games it'll make sense to spend a little extra time on art towards the beginning of development. This time I'll give myself a pass though - I had zero experience making any kind of art prior to this. I mean come on:

[Biijii]

I just finished the final trailer for the game!

It comes out in 2 days

[Biijii]

Just occurred to me that I never updated this devlog about the release...

Hey, my game's out on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/869010/Katto/

I plan to make a video talking about what I've learned from the experience, so I won't go too in depth with that stuff here. Basically I learned a lot, and while I wish more people were playing it, I'm glad I was able to push through and finish it. I'm looking forward to having more free time this winter break, where I can start experimenting with new things in life. For now I know I want to read some books, exercise harder, meditate regularly, practice cooking more, and prep myself for job interviews relating to computer science.

I'm not sure if I'll continue with gamedev. I enjoyed it, but there are still so many things I have yet to try. I think if I have an idea for a game I really like I'll pursue it, but I won't try to force anything.

Thanks to anyone who read any of this devlog! If you want to follow me on future endeavors, hit me up on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Biijii_

Progression of my art style over nearly 2 years