What's goin on guys, welcome back to another devloggerino.
This is going to be a quick one, this week was a bit chaotic so I had a lot less time than usual to work on Angel's Gear. Still though, tons of progress was made!
To start, I wanted to begin making a sort of "test" level, for aesthetic and gameplay purposes. It's just a single screen, but was a decent start to see how far and willing I was to go with the tilesets and visuals.
I made a sort of "trench" area. Referenced a lot of cool historical photos. This was the first go around:
The best thing I learned from this initial test is how important parallax is to a moving screen's environment. For most of my 2D projects so far, I've limited myself to single screen rooms, A- out of an enjoyment for that type of level building, and B- because I couldn't get parallax to look right. I finally got it looking decent here, so there's so much potential for depth. However, the more resources you have at your disposal, the more tempting it is to over-do it. I don't want that, I want the scenes to be as readable as possible while still looking detailed. Color palette and background tile choice will be instrumental in getting this to look decent.
Here is the second attempt at a palette change, which I think looks a lot less visually busy. There's still work to be done here for sure, but for an initial test, not half bad!
Next was adding visual detail. Critters and the like. Ambience is going to be key for this game's rich atmosphere, so having little "ambient decorations" like rats, birds, rain, etc, will be important.
I also made a much more visually appealing change to the Save-Point. The player actually enters the sarcophagus of spines instead of just staring stupidly at them. Small change but huge improvement.
During the creation of this test level, I started to think, "damn, the player has virtually zero verticality". That's a problem. So, the easiest solution to this is a climbing mechanic, AKA ladders. So, ladders are now in the game, featuring a janky but kind of cool climbing animation.
After a successful test level, I began construction of the Hub area which will house all the game's cool NPCs. It's a massive cathedral taken over by mechanical blight, rusted and brown by the apocalypse. My initial go-around was way too cluttered. It looked like this:
After a lot of tweaking, adding some decorations over the course of a few days, and some general palette fuckery, this is where I'm at with it currently.
I'm still messing around with palettes quite a bit. It's extremely brown and purple, which is, like my shit, but it does blend together a little too much. Hard to discern what's important and what isn't. We'll see! But for now, I think it doesn't look half bad.
The Last thing I did this week was do the initial sprites for the NPCs in the hub.
I am so excited to get into these guys, their funny mannerisms, backstories, etc. It's going to be a blast and I hope people will like them.
That's all for this week! See you next weekend!