Hey guys, it's me again!
This week was far slower, a much needed break from the intensity of last week's intro cutscene. I mostly relaxed while putting together the tutorial, which I had most of the assets for already. I began by just blocking it out, which you can see here:
As you can also see, the map system is fully functional! It took a lot of tweaking, and it broke along the way, but the support team from pixel game maker did an incredible job helping me. I'd also like to shoutout Baz who helped that process along immensely.
I also have a new custom animation for being impaled on spikes, so that's cool. I want unique animations for dying to environmental hazards. I have big plans for Mr. Soldier here to get maimed, burned, sliced in two, crushed, trampled, crucified, etc...
The Player controls very strangely in Angel's Gear. I want to give the player enough information that they know the basics, but also for it to take time to master Soldier's clunky-ness. It is intentionally slow, and sort of janky. You're a soldier who's never seen battle, not a weapon primed for mayhem!
I see a lot of indie games going the way of speed, I want to do the opposite of that. I want this game to be, in a way, pretty miserable. Slow, clunky, sort of unfair. These elements will be instrumental in contributing to it's horror theme. I'm confident I can pull it off.
Other than that, I've got some basic tiles and visual theming for the next area cooked up. Check it out!
The next area will be a sort of "water treatment plant". The surface are decorated with thousands of water towers, while the sewers and caverns below gush with now poisoned water. I enjoy the harsh blue tone, but I worry how enemy sprites will conflict. It may be a little too vivid for A.G.'s tone and art style, but I'll figure it out. You should have seen how many passes it took to get the color of the Hub how I wanted. Thankfully, palette swapping is a very simple process, so I can just keep trying palettes until something clicks.
That's all for this week. I will be momentarily slowing down progress on Angel's Gear while I work on my Halloween project, and just in general do a little soul-healing. I've been having a couple health issues relating to stress and work intensity (mainly how it's been effecting my acid reflux and sleep) so I'm just going to chill out for a few weeks and work on things a bit more idly. Progress will still be made, however! See you next week... maybe! If not next week then for sure the week after.