Presentation and Art

The focus this week was to figure out my art style and to get the bulk of texturing done. After trying to draw character models in a cartoony style like Castle Crashers as was my prior intent I settled on pixel art instead. I decided this as I found making sprites in that style too difficult to learn in the short timespan I had to make the game. While still trying to take inspiration from Castle Crashers I started making a player model with pixel art with proportions inspired by that game. I kept that feeling by making the player's head disproportionately large. I then looked at various sets of knight armour online and settled on having dark steel armour with a red cape and plume (a kind of headpiece). After that, I settled on 4 directional movement animations with diagonals defaulting the sideways movements as drawing odd angles of the player's model was not something I was confident in. Finally, I made a 4 frame animation for walking in each direction, the animations for walking forward and backwards have all their sprites finished and the sideways ones are almost complete. A challenge I found was mimicking the assets I drew for forwards and backwards movement when the player was sideways as it was hard to represent the knight's foot sticking out backwards pushing up the cape. While they are not 100% complete here are some example images of my sprites for the player.

I also got to work on creating textures for the floor. For each material, I made multiple tile-able sprites to add variation when I added them to my scene with the tile painter. I limited these to a small colour set each with bricks having a main colour then one darker and lighter shade and wood having the same with added grey for nails. This made the textures reminiscent of older 2d games that did not have access to a wide colour pallet. The brick particularly is very inspired by old pixel art textures used in Gameboy Colour games such as Wario Land 2.

Here is an example of my bricks in Trash Bucket. The bottom and left sides are the darker outlining colour and the top and right are lighter making multiple variations of this sprite tile together.

This week I released multiple updated builds of the game and received feedback on the most recent. After slightly modifying the camera work in prior weeks I have received positive feedback on how the transitions between shots feel in the game. Into the new constructive feedback, I was told it would be appreciated if holding down left click made the player continue shooting bullets at the normal speed. This is a quality-of-life feature I will implement into the game. Also, I was told special effects for the player's dash would be appreciated. Players found that the enemies were annoying as they would hide and get stuck on walls and corners. This was caused by the enemy detecting the player was too close and running away to maintain shooting distance then clipping a wall and not understanding it was there. To fix this I will make sure that enemies avoid walls while maintaining their ability to run away and keep their distance if the player is too close.

After this week's feedback, one major feature was finished in time to feature in this devlog, the boss of this game has been partially implemented and can currently be fought. Two of his attacks have been finished, a wave of bullets for the player to weave between and dodge and the ability to throw an enemy at the player. There will be more of these to come. The behavior of the boss works by randomly selecting an attack and then waiting till it is complete and repeating. This means players must stay on their toes and can't rely on patterns to dodge attacks. Future ideas for attacks include a large shot that covers a significant part of the player's area and a shot that explodes once it hits the wall at the back.

Thank you for reading this week's devlog

- Sam Geoghegan

REFERENCES:
1. wario land 2 : vaincre le spear man géant (youtube.com) (Taken from thumbnail)