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]