hi everyone !! i hope this years off to a good start for you all!
i took a small break towards the start of the month because the long winter and some personal stuff was hurting my motivation but i still managed to get quite a lot done that im excited to share
ill cut to it and start with the big stuff.....
thats right im redoing all the sprites for the third AND FINAL time.. while this may have started to get annoying, i assure you im not doing this for no reason
for starters, the resolution of the sprites was REALLY poorly optimized and has been since i first made art for the game ..
using almost double the size while making no use of that space is obviously a really bad idea.. for reference, dareks original spritesheet was 3150x8550 which crashed my phone and increased loading time dramatically
not to mention it was barely close to complete and there would be 11 more similarly sized sheets...... his newer sheet sat at 1400x3150, obviously not great either considering it had significantly less work done than the previous iteration, but above that there was one far more important issue that needed addressing
pixel art is REALLY time consuming ......
not only did i not have much fun doing said pixel art, it was so so inefficient at least when i do it that it killed my motivation to work on more animations constantly
while planning to begin work on the actual mechanical parts of combat, i realized there was one thing i could do to make it a million times more bearable, that being not doing pixel art. at all.
the end result was beyond my expectations!!!! im so much happier with how the game looks and i think this fits so much better than the pixel art ever did, not only that but it also uses half as much space and is way easier to work with .... im really looking forward to working on animations which is NOT something i felt before !!
im sure youre interested in seeing the end result in action, so heres some footage of that ..
obviously work in progress, but i think it looks really nice!!!!
you may also have noticed a few other changes here......... ill get into those next
firstly, new ui sounds!!!! by Very popular demand (youtube commenters made it abundantly clear the former sounds were really bad) i made a set of new ones that i think work a lot better and are less grating to hear repeatedly i hope..
heres some footage showcasing them with/without background music
let me know what you think !! i really like them personally,, so im less inclined to change them if a few others dont, but it depends on how many people feel strongly about them i suppose
next up,, you may have noticed a new resource meter near energy..... mysterious
heres a brief explanation on that !!
in short, its just another skill resource to manage.. which hopefully adds another layer to the games strategy
lastly,, ill go over something from way earlier in the month that im sure a lot of you are more familiar with
NEW DAREK BATTLE MUSIC !!!!!
https://soundcloud.com/sudo-7-237852643/sea-glass
once again, this is by my super talented friend, please show them some love their music is awesome: https://crittertunes.bandcamp.com/community
wrapping up..
im sure a lot of you are curious about the prologue status, and to be entirely honest, progress is Not fast
im still chipping away at it, but i wont have much to show for a while so please bear with me.. while the focus for now will be on combat mechanics, the prologue will still be developed alongside that
for now, look forward to more engaging combat, since this is a game and i want my game to be as fun as possible
thank you all for your support this month!! let me know any questions you have, otherwise look forward to next time !!!!