More dungeons and pretty environment art
Hello! I spent the last two weeks building more of my game’s dungeons and making some improvements to its environment art.
More dungeons
Six of the game’s twelve areas in adventure mode have now been converted into dungeons! Here’s the fire dungeon, where you gain the ability to break rocks with your hammer:
I’m happy with how all six of these dungeons feel to play, and I’m confident that this is the right design direction for the game’s adventure mode. This was one of the biggest roadblocks stopping me from making a trailer and announcing the game, so I’m going to start working towards that next.
Making the game look more presentable
With my game design worries out of the way, there were three remaining issues stopping me from recording an announcement trailer: the game doesn’t have a name yet, I hadn’t made any trailer music, and the backgrounds still looked a bit too plain.
My plan was to improve the environment art first and do the music afterwards, while thinking about my game’s name in the background.
Environment art: cracked floors and walls
Here's an example of a room from the game that looked a bit flat and plain:
The water is fine, especially in motion, and I don't have any issues with the characters or the HUD either. It's just that the floor and the tops of the walls are a simple repeating pattern, and they're taking up the majority of the screen.
To add a bit of variety to these kinds of flat open rooms, I drew a bunch of cracked floor sprites and updated my editor to give me the ability to place them by hand. After all, if you're going to be staring at the floor I may as well give it a few few points of interest. Here's an example of how the same room looked after adding a bunch of cracked floor and wall decals:
This was a slight improvement and it certainly helped break up the repeating texture a bit, but the next change to the environments made a much bigger difference.
Environment art: paths
Dirt paths are an action-adventure staple, and they were completely missing from my game. Because of this, all of the game's grassy areas were essentially just large green rectangles punctuated with the occasional small flower or tuft of grass:
Here's how the same room looks now, after I drew some path sprites and got them working in the game:
I love them! Despite knowing that they would make more of a difference to the game's visuals than cracked floors and walls, I'm still shocked at just how much of a improvement they were. I'm in two minds about whether or not I should smooth out their corners a bit, but I find their artificial grid-based look charming so I'm leaning towards leaving them like this.
The grassy stages have have paths too, with more of a chunky hexagonal look:
I love how they look! At this point I’m perfectly happy with my game’s environments, so I’ll move on to the soundtrack tomorrow.
Music
I composed a few tracks for the game last year, before putting the rest of the music on hold due to a headache that lasted for six months(!) which made it hard to concentrate. It’ll be interesting to dig through all of my old musical material and see how well it fits the game’s current visual direction. Back when I was making that music the game still looked like this, so there’s a good chance my music will need a few tweaks to make it match the game’s current visuals:
Hopefully two weeks from now I’ll have some music that I like and I’ll have come up with a name for the game, at which point I can start putting together a trailer.
Anything else?
I've been staring at Cotton 2's character portrait animations. They squash and stretch all over the place! I really need to try this game sometime soon; it looks even bouncier than my own game, so I'm sure I'll learn something from playing through it.
Recently I was talking to some friends about arcade-style co-op single screen combat platformers like Bubble Bobble and Rod Land. I was specifically talking how that genre never seems to die, with arcade games like Nightmare in the Dark and ZuPaPa! still being created in the early 2000s and indie entries in the genre still being released today (or in Bloom Paradise's case, literally yesterday). I'm still playing Violent Storm and Mr. Driller 2 for the time being, but I'm sure these games will become a new obsession of mine soon enough.
The demo for Mina the Hollower is out! I worked on it back in 2021 when I was making Chessplosion so it was interesting to get a glimpse at how the game had changed in the four years since then. I only worked on it as a programmer and I didn't have anything to do with its design or visuals, so I can't take any credit for how fun it is to play or look at. But hey, some of my code was presumably still in there somewhere.
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to go listen to some arcade games for sound design inspiration, while resisting the ever-present urge to just make my game sound identical to D.D. Crew. I hope you have a relaxing couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!