Spikes, holes, and pixel art!
Spikes and holes
I've experimented with so many different enemy designs by this point, and I'm confident that I want to turn this prototype idea into a full game. So now I'm working towards making a simple polished prototype where you just fight through a series of screen-sized rooms, clearing out all of the enemies in a room before you continue to the next one. Kind of like a top-down action roguelike, but without any of the items or upgrades or roguelike parts.
First, I tried making some environmental hazards. I could add all sorts of things to the full game, but for now I decided to stick with the spike traps and holes that are in Chessplosion. Except in this game you can knock characters into holes too.
Take a look how how they turned out! Please excuse the lack of a falling-into-a-hole animation in the video footage:
Let me know what you think! The test levels in the video are way too difficult, but I had fun testing them out regardless.
I didn't want to sit here for weeks adding all sorts of environmental hazards to the game, because there are more important things that need doing right now. So I decided to move on.
Pixel art
My initial prototype is pretty much feature complete, when it comes to gameplay code. So I figured it was a good time to start thinking about what game's art direction and drawing some pixel art.
Besides, I love working on gameplay code and I struggle with pixel art. When I was making Ducky's Delivery Service, I did all of the fun gameplay code work at the start of the project and I had to force myself to do the difficult work all at once at the end. I don't want to repeat that mistake on this game, so I'm starting on pixel art now.
As for the art direction, I'm going for a standard cute action-adventure-RPG look. Green fields, cute enemies and so on. Except the player is a duck. Anyway, I've just started drawing some pixel art and this is what I have so far:
It seems to work pretty well! Now I just have to learn how to draw top-down 2D walls and cliffs and other things like that. I don't have much art experience so this will take me a while to figure out, but it's better that I do it now instead of leaving it all until later.
Once I'm happy with how my environment art looks in a mockup screenshot, I'll put it into the game. After that, I can start thinking about animating some top-down characters and making a polished prototype that can be played from start to finish!
And that's all I've done this week. I'm still pretty exhausted for non-work-related reasons, but hopefully I'll be back up to speed soon. Let me know if you like the look of the pixel art, and I'll see you next week!