Hi everyone, during the last few weeks I’ve been on vacation, which has allowed me to spend a lot of time adding more content to the game. Since the previous update, I’ve added:
Many new pieces: portal mage, immortal, cardinal, pawn, and fool
The item system, including gold rewards for winning battles and a shop
A difficulty system to make sure everyone can enjoy the game
Quality of life improvements to the initial army and map system, making sure you’re not shown too many new units at the same time and you always have relevant options on the map
Some polish to the sounds and new tracks by my brother Licus
With all of this, I am very happy with the demo in terms of gameplay. But there are still many visual improvements that I’d like to add, mainly animations to improve the game’s juice.
Next steps
Since Steam’s Next fest is at the beginning of October and I already have a working demo, I’ll focus on marketing during the following weeks. I intend to test many different things and see what sticks to try to build some momentum before the festival. Make sure to wishlist the game on Steam if you haven’t yet. I’ll surely do a minor update when the cover art is ready, and if I have some time to spare I’ll add some extra animations.
After the festival, I’ll go back to developing the game working on a dynamic monologue system and on content for the other 2 stages.
Thanks for reading and as always, subscribe for more updates.
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I’ve always wanted to learn how to make video games, but I just had never gotten to it.
This August I decided to change that. I had a two-week vacation in a remote and quiet place and used my spare time to build my first game. The final result is a short and unpolished game, but I have the satisfaction of having finalised the project and made almost all assets from scratch.
I had no previous experience in video game design, but have coded for some time and I used to draw a lot as a kid. In preparation for the project, I did a 2d platformer Unity tutorial on the afternoons during the week prior to my vacation. I also thought of a whole game concept of a roguelike where you’re an evil weapon (inspired on Nightblood from Stormlight Archive) that is trying to escape its confinement by tricking a human to wield it… but that ended up being waaaay too much and I had to cut the scope multiple times.
Once I had an idea i started planning out the main parts I needed for the project:
Level outline and player control
Enemies, attack and death animations
Aesthetic level design
Enemy sprites
Player sprites
Sound
Menu and victory screen
Level outline and player control
For the level outline, I wanted something short since it was my first project. Also the cultist theme made me think of ancient rituals and a Stonehenge aesthetic, including stone monuments. I ended up building a level that consisted of three main parts:
A couple of platforms to get the player started on the jump mechanics
A plateau with space for a couple of enemies that could be engaged individually
A final area where you had to fight many enemies at the same time
As for the movement, I just used the same control scheme that I’d learned from the platformer tutorial, and improved the jump a bit by learning from other tutorials. I also added gamepad compatibility by follwoing this tutorial. Anecdotally, I missed a small step in the middle of that tuto and ended up wasting more than an hour trying to figure out what was wrong…
This is the result after the first iteration:
Enemies, attack and death animations
Since I wanted to do attack animations I needed some sprites that could do that, not just a bean. So, let me introduce you to …
Bean with a sword
I made it and animated it using Photoshop’s basic tools. And since I didn’t want to waste much time I used it for the player and tweaked its size and color for the enemies.
Once I had my beans in place, I started coding the player’s attack controls and the health system. For the player’s attack, I followed this Blackthornprod tutorial. For the health system, I used what I had learned from the 2d platformer tutorial.
After that, I started coding the enemy AI. I started with a very easy approach that ended up doing the job, with no need for extra complexity. This is the AI’s behavior:
If you’ve recently been hit wait for a bit, else
If the player is in range wait a bit and then attack, else
If the player is in sight follow him, else
If you’re in front of an obstacle turn around, else
Walk in the direction you’re facing
I had also initially planned for “mage” type enemies that shoot fire balls at you, but realised that I didn’t have time to implement that (coding + drawing animations). So I just cut that out of the project.
Something that I wanted to focus on during this project was learning to design beautiful levels such as the ones in Hollow Knight. I searched a bit and found these twoawesome tutorials from a small youtube channel.
After tinkering a bit with some elements, the final level setup was:
Some fog (from the above tutorials)
Black squares to cover “blank” regions
2 or 3 layers of grass paralax in the front (photoshop brushes)
The player layer
Rocks and walls (copied from google images)
3 layers of half-assed (time restrictions…) mountain paralax in the back
A blue sky with stars and a moon that’s too high up to be seen at any moment
I know it lacks polish, but I wanted to finish the project during my vacation so I had to move on.
Here’s the third iteration:
Enemy sprites
My first enemy: the soldier (sword added with PS)
I don’t really like pixel art and I don’t have a drawing tablet, so I decided to draw the characters, take pictures and use photoshop to digitalize them. The traditional way to do this is with the pen tool, but I quickly realized that this would take too much time so I ended up using the magic wand and some filters to make the lines more even. I think the result looks nice enough while being quite fast. If there’s interest I may write a guide detailing my method.
The first step of animating is having a clear character model and the second one id defining which animations. The animations that I needed for the enemy character were:
Walk/run
Attack
Die
Die and attack animations were kind of easy, but running was harder. For the run animation I took inspiration from a shovel knight gif. I used an online tool to break it down into frames and basically copied the leg positions from the frames.
Finally, I added a particle system to simulate blood splashes when the player or an enemy is hit (here’s a coupleof tutorials).
Player sprites
I initially planned on having a hooded guy wielding an evil scythe as the player character
The fact that I used the same placeholder sprites for the player character and the enemies and that I was low on time, led me to do the same for the final sprites. I just added jumping and idle animations and called it a day.
Sound
The sounds I needed were:
Jump
Slash
Character hurt
Character dies
Background music (I shamelessly copied the song of the prayer from FF X)
Click
Victory song
I just recorded all of those with my phone in less than half an hour (all mouth noises). Afterwards, I did some light editing with Audacity and followed a coupleof tutorials to get them into the game.
Menu and victory screen
For the menu, I just followed this tutorial and added the player sprites. I also built victory and defeat screens using the same principles.
Conclusion
Here’s the final result:
And that’s it. I learned a lot from this project and had fun doing it. The result is nowhere near what profesional videogames look like, but it does look better than I anticipated.
This project helped me get a better understanding of what making a full game entails, even if at a small scope. It’s an exercise I’d recommend to all aspiring game developers before getting into bigger projects.
Next, I’ll try to make a project with more focus on playability and less focus on assets. Let’s see how it goes.
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