u/bluemanchu_jon

Hey Zoners! This week I'm starting work animating a new enemy, the Untah. This creep can turn invisible, slash you with metal talons, or hurl them at your face. Rude!

- Ben

This vuf mutant is a complete bad-ass but seriously lacking in staying power. Came close, but didn't make it.

Hi everyone, It's Ben's weekly work in-progress time again.

This week I started work on designing the sprite animation for one of the enemies: The Ulti-Mun. Jon's game mechanic spec for the enemy is that it has four arms, a wider than usual field of vision, makes rapid burst attacks at range and rapid jumping slashes when up-close. I wanted to make an enemy that was visually linked to the Natik, but very clearly a different and more mutated creature. I also wanted the two different attacks to look very different from one another. So what that amounts to is: 2 heads with bulbous eyes that show the player when they can be seen (if you can see it's eye, it can see you) gun hands for shooting and axe hands for slashing!

I like to solve the hardest problems first when animating an enemy. In this case I had a good idea about how to animate him running around and shooting, but a trickier one was rapidly slashing and jumping forward in a quick sequence.

(Note from Jon: the GIF shows what will be a leaping melee attack. However, we will use physics to propel the Ulti-Mun through the air, so the GIF by itself kind of looks like he's just running forward while chopping).

Godzone 6 is a new roguelike first-person game in development by Blue Manchu, creators of Void Bastards and Wild Bastards. Build mutants to explore wildly different play-styles in an immersive first person world. We call it a first-person mutator. Join the community on our Discord channel or subreddit. There's also more info on the Steam page.

WIP Wednesday whipped past, so it's Throwback Thursday instead. Today's item: Evolution of the Pik-vlee.

This small beast was originally named the Squeaker by Jon, as he had envisioned a rat. I've had to kill way too many rats in early levels of games over the years and wanted to make it something more mutated and gross. The first image shows the initial design we prototyped, the Kweek.

The kweek went from a simple vent-crawling enemy to a small beast that split into two smaller ones when killed. Considering this, I came up with the Headsplitter. In the gallery is a thumbnail sketch of the concepts I drew for this on an index card (I keep a stack of index cards on my desk for when I get an idea that needs a sketch, as it's faster than using anything with a screen).

And finally, the gallery shows the Vlee and Pik-vlee prototype animation we currently have in-game.

• Ben (GZ6 art director)

Godzone 6 is a new roguelike first-person game in development by Blue Manchu, creators of Void Bastards and Wild Bastards. Build mutants to explore wildly different play-styles in an immersive first person world. We call it a first-person mutator. Join the community on our Discord channel or subreddit. There's also more info on the Steam page.

Here are all the stages of getting an enemy into Godzone 6. In this case, a Natik.

I use Procreate to draw all the 2d assets in the game, then export to photoshop for coloring and export. Not a lot of notes for this guy... A subtle change that seems insignificant is the slight shift of his rope belt knot away from his hip and more toward the middle. This allowed the character to be mirrored, saving me a good whack of drawings.

The colored sprite is drawn using colour masks - 100% values that the shader then recolours. By doing this we can adjust colours in the game and also have control to sharpen or clamp the colour islands to make them look crisper and not pixelated.

(Not shown: drawing every frame of movement and standing animation by hand from 5 angles, then all the elaborate attacks and deaths).

Happy WIP Wednesday!

Godzone 6 is a new roguelike first-person game in development by Blue Manchu, creators of Void Bastards and Wild Bastards. Build mutants to explore wildly different play-styles in an immersive first person world. We call it a first-person mutator. Join the community on our Discord channel or subreddit. There's also more info on the Steam page.

RIP Rijud, ambushed by an Untah on deck 5.

A short example of the start of a mutant building process. Zurpens start as ranged attackers who can move silently and get into small spaces, but in this run I chose to push into a melee build instead. Lineages suggest build directions, but don't force them.

Godzone 6 is a new roguelike first-person game in development by Blue Manchu, creators of Void Bastards and Wild Bastards. Build mutants to explore wildly different play-styles in an immersive first person world. We call it a first-person mutator. Join the community on our Discord channel or subreddit. There's also more info on the Steam page.