Engine 001

It’s been a while since the last post. The reason is my switch over to Engine001 and working on some projects there. It has taken up so much of my time, getting back into the saddle with where I started was more fun than I imagined! I even came up with a working title; Tales of Astya. It’ll probably change, but for now it shall stay.

What I’ve been working on is a small 2D action RPG, standard for the engine. I’ve put a lot of work into the concept of “open ended quests”, meaning quests can end in several ways. So far it has gone well and the plans have been expanded. The game consists of 36 map screens, laid out in a 6×6 grid. The player is free to move between these whenever he wants, but some areas are targeted more towards higher level characters. The environments are also highly interactive, with bookshelves to read from and containers to search for loot. I’ve developed some lore and feel of the world, more on that in future posts. Don’t want to spill the beans all at once after all.

Checking out some books

As of yet there isn’t really any main story. The main point of the game is players making their own stories by doing the quests in the way they see fit, being either good or evil. Or something in between.

As per usual I’m trying new methods of creating art, and this time I decided to try out rendering a 3D model to 2D frames for the animations of the game characters. The setup looks like this, with 8 cameras that render out the different angles.

After rendering a direction, I import the frames to 001 and start slicing up the different body parts to fit the layered clothing system. After some tweaking, I ended up with this:

I’m planning to release a small test version in about a month, I just have to finish up some of the initial quests you find and the level designs and we should be good to roll. Gonna be nice to actually release something for once.

That’s all for this week, cya next tuesday.

Stylistic experiments & change of workflow (eventually)

For the past week I’ve almost not spent any time in Unity, but GG Maker instead. Maybe it was nostalgia, or maybe it was a desire to try something new. Probably nostalgia. Either way, I downloaded and installed it Wednesday last week and have been using it for a few hours almost every day since then. This does not mean that the desert island project is cancelled or put on hold, it’s still alive. It’s just not been my focus for a few days.

However, after using GG Maker for a week, I’ve decided to split my workflow in two; Unity for smaller, more focused prototypes and using GG Maker for creating more adventure games within the same lore-universe as the desert island game. I still plan to finish it before making the final switch,  as cancelling it at this point would just be stupid considering how much time I’ve spent on it. The reason for this change is that GG Maker allows for much faster iteration for RPG’s with more or less all the systems already in place for creating branching dialogue, proper inventory management and lots of flexibility. Instead of rewriting the code I’ve made for the desert island game to work with other games in the future, I’ll use Unity for more experimental projects.

One week in the making

If you follow me on Twitter you may have already heard about this project. I decided to challenge myself with the style of this game by using the NES color palette, and only those colors. It has proven a bit harder than anticipated, but also a lot of fun. The project I’ve been working on has been a isometric adventure game with more focus on the dialogue and level design, encouraging the player to take different choices to reach various goals. It also uses voxels for the various objects throughout the scene, like those trees, except for the characters which are flat 2D sprites. It certainly gives the game a unique look. Below is a test scene inspired by the desert island game.

That’s all for this week, ya’ll know you’ll get a new post next week.