I wish I could list all the cool new content, but I was busy just adding basic necessities to the demo that should have all been in there to begin with. That being said, I finally have my engine at a level of quality I enjoy and from now on I'll focus a lot more on content then lame stuff like "saving".
If you want to check out my game Mazesatalker on Steam, it has a demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3218310/
My first project was a failure.
One reason for this was a principle that I carry since conceiving the first ideas: Your main character as an art asset has a special meaning. In my favorite games I know the game characters intimately, every animation frame, every pixel, every effect. I mean duh, you spend hours upon hours of staring at this one asset and studying it to a ridiculous degree.
Your main character has to look and feel "fun" for many hours. Among all the art that is sort of throwaway, the main character always stays on the screen.
In my first project I worked on the main character asset in a pixel based artstyle. I would polish each animation for days, dozens of iterative loops, I began to realize that if I have to work like this, I will never finish.
This is why Mazestalker, being basically a 2D game, still uses a 3D engine: It allows me to constantly evolve the artstyle of my main character without having to redraw a hundred animation sprites every time I make a new decission.
So in the last half year or so, a few years into the project I had a couple of ideas on how to present my main character, that weren't really clear at the start opf the process. I now enter a phase where I must record some final footage and so I was hard at work making my character shine.
I'm very happy with the look and feel of it and so I think this is finally a chapter I can close.
Here's the steps on how the art style evolved over the years:
* A cell shaded look evokes the hand drawn feeling of sprite-animation.
* I apply a specific dynamic lighting layer ONLY to the main character so the light always looks correct and good on the model itself.
* I reworked the animation system to a ridiculous degree and it is by now the most complex system in my game. Animations are timed with specific animation-keyframes to emphasize poses and actions, there's even more layers and additional animators...
* I wanted the character to play a random attack animation from a set to underline Yves espressivo, independent style.
* I like working with darkness, but sometimes that means the character is hard to see. This is one of the reasons I added an emissive outline to both Yves hair and her backpack. It's always visible even in the darkest corners.
* Recently I added a physical shader to the backpack so it now bounces around with the character movement. This adds a fun layer to the character that draws my eye during platforming and general navigation.
* The final step was a decision I made recently: I render all animations at 12 FPS. I think this will be the most controversial features, but I did add a layer for finetuning which allows me to control the frames that get rendered specifically. It gives the main character another layer of stylization that evokes the retro feeling I'm going for.
All of this together makes the look of my main character.
If you want to check out my game on Steam, it has a demo:
I always try to create a visual style that is reminiscent of retro-aesthetics, without actually being retro at all.
As I play with ideas, this one came to my mind recently. On the left you can see the characters animations being rendered at a decreased FPS.
I immediately prefer looking at it, even though a modern audience would definately say it's choppy. But it has an air of sprite-sheet animation and since animation-keys are already emphasized in the animations themselves, I even mostly get keyframes to do their job.
What do you think? Left or right?
If you want to check out my game on Steam, it has a demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3218310/
While I was stuck in "early game jail" I had to build very straight forward areas. Now I get to start to making isometric illusions and puzzles, which is why I'm doing all of this to begin with! Fun times indeed!
If you want to check out my game on Steam, it has a demo (to be updated soon, so it's a bit outdated as of today):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3218310/
If you would like to join a Discord of likeminded people, you can join me here: discord.gg/6r6SbbSC67
It may be immediately apparant, but I'm a big fan of the simple Action-RPG of the 16-Bit era.
I appreciate simplicity, visual clarity and a lot of other qualities that I feel got lost a little from the mainstream of today. And since I got tired of waiting for someone to craft the exact game I wanted to have (fans of the classic Landstalker will know what I mean!), I simply set out to make it myself.
Lately progress has been very steady and I think it's time to reach out to likeminded people who would want to play a game like this!
So I hope you allow me to introduce Mazestalker. The game consists of a Zelda-like overworld, a Metroidvania-like underground and a many seperate dungeons. There is a big focus on story and world, but I don't talk about that for the moment because noone is looking for that.
To sum it up, if you like games like Alundra, Landstalker, Crusaders of Centy, Secret of Evermore or Terranigma, I take a lot of inrpiration form all of these.
Aside from hiring freelancers for little things here or there, I work on this project by myself.
Publishers have no interest to see a game like this made and I am fully committed to seeing this through to the end by myself.
But part of that is collecting players on the journey, so if you want to check out my game on Steam, it has a demo (to be updated soon, so it's a bit outdated as of today):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3218310/
If you would like to join a Discord of likeminded people, you can join me here: discord.gg/6r6SbbSC67
It may be immediately apparant, but I'm a big fan of the simple Action-RPG of the 16-Bit era.
I appreciate simplicity, visual clarity and a lot of other qualities that I feel got lost a little from the mainstream of today. And since I got tired of waiting for someone to craft the exact game I wanted to have (fans of the classic Landstalker will know what I mean!), I simply set out to make it myself.
Lately progress has been very steady and I think it's time to reach out to likeminded people who would want to play a game like this!
So I hope you allow me to introduce Mazestalker. The game consists of a zelda-like overworld, a Metroidvania-like underground and a many seperate dungeons. There is a big focus on story and world, but I don't talk about that for the moment because noone is looking for that.
To sum it up, if you like games like Alundra, Landstalker, Crusaders of Centy, Secret of Evermore or Terranigma, I take a lot of inrpiration form all of these.
Aside from hiring freelancers for little things here or there, I work on this project by myself.
Publishers have no interest to see a game like this made and I am fully committed to seeing this through to the end by myself.
But part of that is collecting players on the journey, so if you want to check out my game on Steam, it has a demo (to be updated soon, so it's a bit outdated as of today):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3218310/
If you would like to join a Discord of likeminded people, you can join me here: discord.gg/6r6SbbSC67
As a solodev I should have all the freedom in the world on how to structure my production plan. For the longest time I just worked on what was fun, but that changed fast when I had to think about the bigger picture.
Last year my development plan was driven almost entirely by the release of my demo. For an eternity it was crystal clear which areas and which features I would have to work on next.
Then the demo released and I thought I got my freedom back.
But the theme of this year has emerged already and it really looks almost the same: Now I need polished footage for my trailer. Which means I need to design certain key areas and moments and polish them. And since I have a good idea of what will catch the eye of my audience (those who stalked the lands will underatand) I yet again feel like what needs to be made next is set in stone for the rest of the entire year.
If you are curious about my game Mazestalker, you can find my demo here (although it is gettign increasingly outdated...): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3218310/
Recently I added a long planned feature ot my game: Timing based crits. With that feature in place I can finally get a feel for my battle gameplay and with that I must take the next step: There's no challenge yet. I have been stuck in Tutorial-Taratarus for a full year and now it is finally time to explore where I can take this.
And so, without much thinking, this new enemy emerges: It's fast, it cannot be damaged unless you trigger the crit and it killed me quickly a few times. For now, I like the flow that is emerging and I especially like how I am entering a phase where not everything is planned or thought out and I get to explore the emergant properties of the game I've been building.
This is the fun part!
If you are curious about my game Mazestalker, you can find my demo here (although it is gettign increasingly outdated...): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3218310/
The other day I finally finished a feature that is currently missing from my Demo: Death. I've talked about this weird effect before, that if you want to produce a vertical slice of a game it's almost like you have to finish the whole thing. This is part of why some essential things are not in my demo, even though they should be, the death feature in particular has been a keen reminder of the one lesson that I took away from my work on Mazestalker so far, one that I really feel needs to be talked about more:
In video game development the last 10% of your game are truly 50% of the work. (I'm nowhere near finished, but this also applies to sub-steps I feel)
I think this fundamental truth is responsible for the heavy air of unfulfilled dreams that defines this space like none other. I've been thinking a lot about why it feels that way and this death feature is a great example.
All the pieces were in place, I planned ahead. But death depends on the save system, the save system ties into pretty much every other noteworthy system and so it just becomes an indescribable rat tail of complexities that should be trivial but is not.
All that was left to do was to plug it all together and sort out a few bugs. But planning that, executing, testing, polishing, it makes no sense that somehting that is done "on paper" still takes such a huge amount of work, but in reality it is and I could imagine that is a trap a lot of people fell into in the past.
Anyway, if you are curious about my game Mazestalker, you can find my demo here (although it is gettign increasingly outdated...): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3218310/