Hello! I spent most of these last two weeks designing a new melee enemy and drawing a funny frog. I’m truly living the dream. But first…

I recolored my game’s enemies

I like my games' pixel art but I recently started to wish that the characters looked a bit more vibrant. The black and white enemies such as the chickens were the biggest offenders, with their fully greyscale shadows making them feel a bit on the drab side.

So I got some coloring advice from some artist friends and did a quick pass on all of the enemies' color palettes! You can see the changes here:

The black and white enemies show the biggest improvement, but I really do think the new colors make all the other enemies stand out a little bit more too. Turns out that color theory is important! Tinting the lit areas towards yellow and the shadowed areas towards violet goes a long way, and the black chickens and boars stand out much more now that they’re technically dark blue instead.

Frogs

Now that I’ve made a few full stages for my game’s arcade mode, I started to feel like the adding one or two more melee enemy types to the game would make a big difference. After prototyping a few different concepts, I ended up with an enemy that hops back and forth and pokes at you with a thin two-square-long melee attack.

I figured a frog would be the perfect visual design for this enemy so I tried to draw one. I still struggle pretty hard with art, to the point that whenever I try to draw a new enemy type there’s a pretty good chance I’ll have to scrap my first idea and draw something else instead.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be happy with the final result; I love the game’s fire-breathing boar enemies, even though the only reason they exist is because I couldn’t figure out how to draw a dragon or a lizard. But it did mean that I wasn’t expecting much from my first attempt at drawing a frog. Thankfully, I ended up with this little guy:

They made me laugh so hard that I knew I had to keep them. They’re the strongest enemy in the game right now thanks to their ability to dance in and out of your attack range and lead your movement with their attacks, so hopefully their adorable looks will stop players from getting too mad at them.

Here they are in an arcade stage!

This stage’s boss is a rework of the old footsie slime prototype boss fight, with a bit of a twist. I’m so glad I could sneak that boss fight into the game’s arcade mode!

Anything else?

I’ve been playing videogames! The 90s arcade game Sol Divide is like a combination of an arcade shooting game and a beat em up, so you have 8-way free movement and you have to dodge enemies' bullets but your main goal is to lock down enemies using the hitstun from your melee attacks. It’s super interesting, but unfortunately you don't have a whole lot of control over the enemies compared to other beat em ups; you can't grab enemies or launch them around the screen or anything like that. So you feel a bit powerless in some situations, as far as your basic moveset goes. But it's an extremely cool concept and I would love to make a game inspired by it one day!

Shadow of the Ninja Reborn just released today, and it’s one of the best new games I’ve played in a long time. It's a followup to the NES game Shadow of the Ninja made by the same team that created the original game (and Wild Guns Reloaded, Pocky and Rocky Reshrined and Ninja Saviors). After playing it in my lunch break today I'm shocked at how much it feels like it was specifically made just for me. Its satisfyingly weighty movement and beat em up-esque attacks and enemy reactions feel so refreshing in a world full of frictionless games about effortlessly gliding through levels without ever having to slow down. It's a difficult game and it's certainly not for everyone but I adore it, and I highly recommend it if you like arcade-style action platformers like Ghouls n Ghosts or Metal Slug!

That’s all I’ve been up to. I’m planning on spending the next couple of weeks making more arcade mode stages, and maybe I’ll even have enough of then that I can combine them together into a full-length arcade mode that can be played from start to finish. Hope you have a great couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!