Immediately giving my game a second visual makeover
Hello! Right before the holidays I spent a couple of weeks improving my game’s visuals, which concluded with me heavily implying that I was done with the game’s art and was moving onto the other aspects of the game. So now that I’m back from my break, I’m… improving the game’s visuals again.
Making my game’s visuals messier
When I was working on my game’s visuals up until the holidays, I was laser-focused on trying to make the individual sprites as pretty as possible. I wanted a nice-looking main character fighting against nice-looking enemies with a nice-looking HUD at the top of the screen, and so on.
I think I did a pretty decent job of this. I love my game’s art, and I’m no longer concerned about whether or not I’m capable of drawing or animating competent-looking characters.
With those worries out of the way, I took a couple of weeks off for the holidays. When I returned, it was much easier to look at the game with fresh eyes and see the bigger picture, especially because I’ve been given lots of useful feedback on the game’s recent patron build.
At this point, I’m comfortable saying that as much as I love the game’s current look, I think I can do a much better job of making its visuals match the unhinged chaos of its gameplay. Older game studios such as Treasure weren’t afraid to squash, scale and rotate their sprites all over the place and fill the screen with visual effects, especially in their wilder-looking pixel art games like Guardian Heroes, Rakugaki Showtime and Dark Souls. This was pretty common among pixel art games in the late 90s, to the point that even puzzle games like Taisen Tokkae Dama and Money Puzzle Exchanger did a great job of conveying excitement through their visuals.
So I decided that I’m going to push my game’s visuals in this direction too. It is, after all, a silly cartoony game about hitting clockwork animals with a hammer and sending them flying into each other. If it ends up looking neat and tidy, I’m doing something wrong.
I should clarify that I love my existing sprites as they are and I don’t plan on changing any of them. What I do plan on doing, however, is squashing, stretching and scaling the character sprites all over the place, as well as filling the screen with a ton of visual effects and adding screen freezes for important events like taking out bosses or dropping bombs. Once I’ve done all of this, I’ll see how the game looks and go from there.
Squashing and stretching my characters
Up until now, my engine was designed for neatly drawing lots of sprites at their exact 1:1 scale, making sure everything looked as clean as possible. You could still technically scale or rotate sprites, but the interface for doing so was surprisingly unwieldly.
I spent a while adding a system to make it easy for me to squash, stretch and rotate several sprites together as a group, such as enemies who have wind-up keys on their backs, so it would be easier for me to add little bits of visual polish later in the game’s development cycle on a whim. Once that was done, I started adding tons of little squash and bounce animations to the game’s characters:
I can’t believe I hadn’t already done this earlier; making these enemies squishy and bouncy just feels right to me. They don’t always look great if you pause them mid-animation, but smear frames don’t always look great in regular animation either. Besides, I want the game to look messier anyway.
Planning hitsparks and VFX
When I finish the rest of the squashing and stretching, I’ll move on to hitsparks and visual effects. These are things like the sparks that fly out of enemies when you hit them, the trails that they leave behind when you launch them across a room, and the explosions that you see when they hit a wall. I don’t know exactly how I want the game’s visual effects to look yet, other than that I want them to be much, much bigger than they used to be.
When I first drew the game’s existing visual effects, I made the mistake of comparing their size to the size of the game’s characters. If a fighting game had hitsparks that were slightly bigger than a character, I assumed that my game should have hitsparks that were slightly bigger than a character too. In retrospect, this is completely the wrong way to think about it, and the thing that actually determines the impact of a visual effect is how much of the screen it takes up. So because my game’s characters are pretty small on the screen, I ended up with small visual effects to match.
Instead of trying to describe exactly how big I want my game’s visual effects to be, it’s probably easier to explain what I mean with a quick doodle. Basically, I’d like them to be at least this big:
These effects look great in my head, but it’ll be interesting to see how they feel once I’ve drawn them for real and hooked them up to the game. Honestly, I kind of just want to drop those yellow stars straight into the game as they are…
Anyway, that’s what I’m working on next. I’ve got a good feeling about how the game will look after these changes but we’ll see how it goes.
Getting into beat em ups
In the last newsetter issue I mentioned my blog post about getting into arcade beat em ups via The Punisher. It wasn’t that far away from being a tutorial on how to learn to play the genre, so I added a bunch of gameplay tips at the end of the blog post and even recorded a video version of it. I hope you find this useful if you’re interested in learning how to play arcade beat em ups at a non-button mashing level.
Anything else?
The latest chapter of What Happens Next just finished and I love it as always. If you're at all interested in what the comic is about ("1. the aftermath of a murder, 2. posting on the internet, 3. the midwestern united states, 4. being gay and transgender" according to its about page), I really can't recommend it enough.
I've been playing more Shiren the Wanderer 6 too. It's still my favorite game of 2024 and I love all of the wild and inventive post-game dungeons I've tried so far, including one tiny dungeon that only has five floors (compared to the 20+ floors on almost every other dungeon) but which cranks up the difficulty so high that you really have to work hard to clear it. If you're interested in trying a turn-based mystery dungeon game, this is a great place to start.
I’m going to go play some fighting games tonight, then I’ll dive right back into working on my game’s visual effects. I hope you have a great couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!