Giving my game a visual makeover
Hello! I spent the last couple of weeks animating my game’s main character Tess and drawing a new HUD. It’s starting to look much more like a real game!
Animating Tess
Tess’ animations are pretty similar to the prototype duck sprites, except with a bit of ear wiggle. Here’s her horizontal hammer swing animation, for example:
I adjusted her in-game color palette too, to make her feel at home among all the brightly colored enemies:
The next section of this post shows what she’s like in the game. I’m really happy with how she turned out and I hope you like her too!
Redesigning the HUD
Up until a week ago, the game’s HUD looked like this:
And the numbers that popped up when you took out a group of enemies looked like this:
Although this was serviceable, it didn’t have that cute chunky late 90s arcade vibe that I craved. So I decided to redesign the HUD and I bundled in a rework of the game’s health system to go with it.
The health rework is simple: arcade mode now gives you a smaller health pool (three hearts instead of five) and you have multiple lives instead of just one. I didn’t want to give players any sort of long-term punishment for taking one or two hits in each stage of an arcade run, so giving players a three-heart health pool and refilling their health at the end of each stage should do the trick! Besides, I love the tension that comes with being one hit away from death, so giving the player multiple lives means they’ll get to feel that way multiple times in a run.
With that decided, It was time to draw the new HUD. I looked at lots and lots of cute late 90s pixel art games like Cotton 2, Purikura Daisakusen, Money Puzzle Exchanger and even some RPGs like Grandia, then I settled on a visual design that I was happy with:
I love it! I think it’s way cuter than the old one, and it’s much easier to see how many resources you have. The giant score numbers make it more satisfying to keep a 16x chain going or take out several enemies with a bomb too! Playing well feels so much more rewarding now than it did a week ago.
I’m still considering the possibility of four player co-op, so I made a condensed version of the new HUD that can be used in three or four player runs:
With the new player character and HUD, it finally feels like the game is coming together! There’s still plenty of work to do: co-op multiplayer, adventure mode, sprites for the bosses, and all the music and sound effects. But the ending is in sight, even if it’s still fairly far away!
Anything else?
It’s the Steam winter sale! You can save 50% on Chessplosion and Ducky’s Delivery Service on Steam for the next couple of weeks, and you’ll be able to do the same over on itch.io starting tomorrow.
I kept playing The Punisher and I cleared it on the hardest difficulty without dying a couple of days ago! I finally feel like I understand how to play arcade beat em ups. I’ll write up a post about it sometime, maybe even with a guide on how to get into the genre via The Punisher. It’s a great game!
The latest Shiren the Wanderer game is out now on PC and apparently it’s fantastic! I’m looking forward to playing it for the next couple of weeks.
Speaking of which, I didn’t take enough vacation this year so I’m taking the next two weeks off work. I’ll still post a newsletter in a couple of weeks (maybe talking about my progress towards my 2024 goals and deciding on what I want to do next year) but other than that I’ll mostly be getting some rest. I hope you have a great couple of weeks too and I’ll see you next time!