Hello, everyone! The last two weeks were quite rough. The real work starts now! As it starts, we’re experiencing some minor problems with.. everything. After all, we are a team of three now. And we’re learning to work together.

First of all, I found a pretty good Spine animator. He and I think alike, he has a lot of experience, and the prices are good. After a week, I already have five or six animations of the main character (we need twice as many). I should also mention that I started learning a few things about Spine, but it’s really difficult for me for some reason.

Before we began, however, I had to create a proper design document and write down all the tasks for the animator and artist for a month. It took me four or five days to complete it, but after that, the future game started to take shape! I think the first demo will be ready in a month or a month and a half.

What about my good old artist friend? She’s been working nonstop the last week because there are a lot of tasks ready for her. She drew the main character from different angles for the animations and started working on locations.

Slowly but surely, we are getting there. As I said before, some time was wasted on fixing work processes. But I have to say something. The previous attempt at making Homelands (the previous 2D game) finished at this very step. Nothing worked, and the development was jammed for good. This time, everything is working like a charm and I’m super happy about this!  [No more abandoned projects]

Hello, everyone! I’m happy to report that we’ve started to work on the game’s art side! I also learned the very basics of shaders.

After publishing the previous post, the first thing I did was write a little design document for the game’s visuals. Then I contacted good fellow (and very talented) artist girl and asked her to help with the game design. She agreed and sent me some good artwork shortly after. I’ve attached one of her pics. It’s just a concept, but I already love it! The next task is to create the main character, which is currently in progress.

Not so long ago, I also started looking for animators to bring the game to life. I’m still rummaging through resumes and collecting candidates. It’s looking really good, I already found a few skilled people. I hope we’ll find a new team member (the third one) in just a few days. I’m going to keep the team small, without sound designers and concept artists. Not like I did a year ago. Let’s try this new approach.

Before I started looking for animators, I had some “free time” while waiting for our artist to decide on the future style. I added a version number and a changelog to the main menu. Then I moved the buttons around in the pause menu and added a quit button. Now, a “press again to exit” window pops up in both the pause and main menus.

What’s next? Shaders! I wanted to learn the basics of this gamedev magic. And I learned a thing or two. After several days of severe headaches and studying spatial and temporal trigonometry, I can perform basic tricks. For example, I can make the main character flash white when it takes damage! Or add a vignette to the borders of the screen. I also tried playing around with the enemy’s projectile, but it already looked pretty cool, so I just fixed a few bugs without changing it’s appearance.

I can’t wait to create a demo with art and animations, but for that, I must find a really good animator… [No more abandoned projects]