New art and animation
Hello! This week I've been improving my new game's art, by adding some new animations and story scene character portraits.
New story scene art
My new game isn't very story heavy, but at the end of each world a character will ask you to deliver a special one-off package. These short story scenes are a good excuse for me to draw my ducks as something bigger than a tiny sprite, so I'm trying to make the most of the opportunity.
I left these character portraits until the end of development because I thought I would hate the process of making them. I only have experience drawing small sprites, so I was worried that I wouldn't be able to make the characters look right at a higher resolution. But it turns out that drawing is a lot less scary and a lot more fun than I expected, and I'm really happy with how they look:
I've wanted to learn to draw for quite a while, and this sort of "HD" pixel art has been a fun way of practicing some standard drawing techniques while still being able to use my pixel art tricks. I haven't quite finished drawing all of the characters in the game yet, but here are two of my favorites so far:
New animations and effects
I've recently been playing some beautiful looking 2D arcade games such as Metal Slug (which I finally managed to clear without dying!) and Gokujou Parodius. I'm currently a bit burnt out on the current popular indie 2D action game subgenres (metroidvanias, progression-heavy roguelites etc), but these well-crafted arcade games reminded me why I love videogames in the first place.
Their incredible pixel art also inspired me to give my game a bit of extra graphical polish, to make the act of delivering packages feel as satisfying as possible. So I added a new animation when a package lands in a mailbox, and I drew a dust cloud that appears when you land on the ground. I think it makes a big difference!
Chessplosion is 50% off again
Steam is running an event promoting games made in the town where I live (Guildford, England), so Chessplosion is 50% off for the next 4 days! Normally if I don't tell you in advance about a Steam sale, it's because it's under an NDA and I'm not allowed to tell anyone. But this time it's because I only just managed to get Chessplosion included in the event at the very last minute. So if you know anyone who missed out on the Autumn sale and wants to buy Chessplosion, it's on sale again!
That's all I have for this week. As always, reply to this email if you have any thoughts on anything I talked about. See you next time!