next »

[SolS]

Distant Valley

During the first age, within the valley of stones, a tribe has lost their purpose in life and no longer feel connected to each other or the land. However, the marks of time have spoken to you. Showing you a glimpse of a forgotten truth and awakening your mind to certain knowledge that is now missing from your people. Instinct is driving you to journey to the edge of the world in search of the memory cave where the meaning to everything must be found.

The game's story will probably be altered to something a bit more focused at some point.












Various early mockups.

 
 

I originally wanted to include an alternate palette option that would give you a slightly surreal SMB2 like saturated look but I'll probably just scrap that idea.



I'm going to also utilize art from this Toejam and Earl mockup I made sometime ago to make some kind of worldmap for the game.

[QOG]

All your projects seem really cool, I look forward to playing one some day  .

Also while I know you're planning to make it wider there might also be some interesting design consequences by keeping things narrow but tall vertically.

[SolS]

Thanks! I do like how they look with a narrow width so if I widen them it won't be by too much.

[Yong]

Nice style! I find the alternate palette the most visually interesting and attention-grabbing though it may be just a little too harsh on the eyes?

[SolS]

Thanks! I do agree it's a bit harsh. There's a good chance I'll tone it down a little once I start testing things in game.

[SolS]

Kind of a collage of rough mockups and ideas.

[SolS]

Here's a better look at the other mountain background in different palettes.

[SolS]

Haven't been working on much lately but I was testing the physics this morning. Trying to see if I can use the default jump physics built into the games factory so I have a smoother jump but still keep the other collision detectors I used in Seas of Saturn.

The result is still buggy, the character sometimes sinks into the ground a few pixels after landing. I made it bump the character back up if that happens but now it just looks like he shakes a bit when he lands sometimes. There's other issues too so I may just end up trying to learn game maker if I can't make it work in tgf. I think I have a solution that might work though.



Also did some parallax with the background which I've never tried before so that was fun.

Here's another with a few things added in.



Added a walking animation. I might add a frame or two later on but this is good for now.

[cynicalsandel]

this is the greatest

[SolS]

Thanks! 

[SolS]

some mockups. should be clearer in motion.



Here's some quick edits with the less stretched but still long skulls. I've used these in my other game but they look pretty cool in a prehistoric setting so it makes sense to reuse them. They're inspired by the flying skull enemies from Keith Courage in Alpha Zones for the TurboGrafx-16.

[SolS]

I was experimenting with an unused background but the colors were a bit too unnatural and saturated. Although I'd like to capture the mood of this version for a late game stage.



I then tried using some of the previous palettes on it and got some really nice results. I got a bit carried away. These will be clearer in motion with the parallax.





Of course most of them won't be used but it was interesting to see how many variations I could get with a few different colors. I could also get other variations by using the foreground from the previous gifs with these backgrounds at some point as well.

I was also trying to sketch a giant dinosaur that would show up from behind the mountains and shoot a stream of fireballs at you. I was trying to give it a shadowy look similar to the early morning lighting on the mountains but it's a bit difficult to get a good in between of shading to get that spooky look without it either being too solid in color or too much of a silhouette. I'll keep tweaking it but here's a very rough wip of it.



I realized as I was trying to draw it that I had the rink-rinker-fink from that Dr. Seuss book on my mind. Now that I think about it I bet those bone dragons from Yoshi's Story were inspired by that as well.

[SolS]

Quick parallax test with two of the palettes.

[QOG]

Awesome progress! I think a very slight parallax effect on the sun would be a nice touch though, looks odd when jumping now.

Also really digging these angular mountains. They don't seem like they ought to mesh with the style of the rest of the game, but somehow do:

[SolS]

Thanks! Right now the mountains are actually the slowest parallax I can do. Ideally I'd like to have the sun move slightly too. I'll check again to see if I can figure out how to do that but I'm hoping to move up from games factory to GM studio at some point, Mostly for better physics but I'm assuming parallax would also work better in that as well.

And glad to hear you like the angular mountains! For the most part I'm trying to stick to the style in the initial mockup but so far most things fit in the game pretty well as long as there's a lot of black in it.

[SolS]

A quick mockup with the stone hand enemy. They appear, create a flame to throw at you, and then disappear until you shoot them down with your spear. And another mockup with some hatched bird like dinosaurs.

[SolS]

Here's some pterodactyl enemies thrown in. Like I mentioned before some of these mockups are a bit hard read as still images but they should be fine in motion.



And here's another attempt at a late game stage palette.

[TebiFestival]

This art style is wonderful, the gif where you have parallax on the foreground looks amazing.

You have a lot of very good color palettes, it would be amazing if in-game these would transition seamlessly between them, as a day and night cycle kind of thing.

[SolS]

Thanks! A time of day transition during a stage would be really nice actually, I'll probably try that at some point.

I was planning to at least have it change on some stages if part of the level was underground but I hadn't considered doing it like that.

[SolS]

Another in motion test.