yohoho, yeah it’s been year or two since i write a devlog. good news: we’re actually alive!! OAO such wow.
no we’ve just... been using twitter more regularly lately (compared to facebook or tumblr). please do follow us: @stellarNull
this is what are we working on right now:
looking good?
now i’ll write chronologically about how we start this project.
1. Just a prototype
in case you’re following us some years ago, we were working on Stellar Arms (now suspended due to financial concerns), then Frontgate Fighters (soon to be released --for real now) for months, we had to wait for publisher, another publisher, it took us too long, that we could make stuff better than nothing. it might be released next year, early. hopefully.
the point on starting this prototype was... firstly, we were bored and feeling unproductive. our dev spirit was dying. we didn’t release anything for a year. we want to start working on a project again.
at first it started as experimental project with an ideas like:
“Let’s do a macho hack and slash, 2D top down view, with a heavy melee weapon, like Dark Souls.
Then we try to do that with better efficiency compared to our usual stuff, also other people’s” (keyword = efficiency. wait for it.. )
okay sure. let’s jam while we wait. we started to call this as Anuirit. we tend to codename our prototypes anu- something, just like Stellar Arms, we once named it “Anu-star” (star from Gunstar Heroes). which triggered questions among English-speaking friends (lmao) at twitter and TIGforum because... ANUStar. small note: “anu” means = something, in Javanese language. while “irit” means = efficient.
(early build, i made the assets as quick as possible, because we just need to test it, it’s ugly but kinda worked. i didn’t even think about the character’s concept, nor what’s the weapon is.)
secondly, we need to generate another source of income, we’re currently depending on our mobile games profit share. it keeps going down for sure, because we’re not doing any more marketing, updating, or planning to make another on mobile platform.
now we plan to start sticking our nose to PC platform rather than mobile market. testing the water, sort of.
2. Starting to take this seriously
me and @ricolemba had some discussion about me wanting to make a game concerning foods or farming. i always a sucker toward games that has cooking, eating or planting. food is my passion *_*)9.
then we discussed a lot about Legend of Mana, its art direction, its pros and cons. and thinking what could we “fix” it our way.
(my attempt on reverse engineering LoM’s trail effect, *BG and sprite stolen*)
we even replayed it together for research (and laugh) sake. eventually we decide to put the farming and cooking into Anuirit.
then another burst of impulsive chats of roguelike dungeon crawling games and procedural maps (as @ricolemba tried to prototype the generator for curiousity) influences our vision as well.
roguelike procedural dungeon crawling + farming and cooking + action combat with heavy weapon.
later, continue to pre-production phase, forming a proper GDD, estimated a realistic scope and schedule (turned out fail). we started to change the codename from Anuirit to Anuchard, the “-chard” comes from orchard.
we then proceeded to discuss about art direction and other technical decisions.
(direct screenshot from the GDD, lot of pictures are stolen obviously)
3. Technical insight: graphical efficiency
EFFICIENCY 1: Units facings
this game is presented as a (semi?) top down view, but instead of making the sprite 3 direction (facing north, south, east-west mirrored) we tried trick it into 2 facings, yet similar to isometric sprites. we tested if it would look awkward moving in top down maps, with isometric sprite.
(very early mockup to test if 2 directions would work well in topdown angle map. it was actually used in the prototype. map stolen from Golden Sun.)
(these are the assets from the current build)
as for enemies, we use only 1 side, south (or is it south-west?) facing, mirrored.
i know it’s not a new thing to brag or be awe/ wow about, but if done right, it would sure saves me TONS of workload. we’re talking about action game project after all. i can save those energies to do something else more matter.
EFFICIENCY 2: Trim down animation frames
i used to animate with more frames, compensated with less detailed/polished renders, also mostly stick to no outline pixel style. (so much indiedev using the style). my aim usually is simple looking, or even flat, but dynamic.
(one example animation from Frontgate Fighters: 11 frames)
(one example animation from LD jam project Grand Steam Duel: 24 frames)
even though i don’t make animations with THAT many frames (see Fool, Syosa, snakepixel, konjak; to check their level of smoothness). but this time, i’m making it even lesser than my usual.
i learn more about effective key-animating, deepening animation principals like: anticipations, exaggeration, squash and stretch, etc. i actually don’t really familiar with the terms until now. my aim is to minimize frames i’m going to render while maintaining the impact. so the energy saved from rendering less frames, could be traded to beautify each frames drawn.
6 frame > 4 frame idling comparison
8 frame > 4 frame walking comparison
EFFICIENCY 3: Theme choice
hmmm abstract or minimalism. not sure. i just like simple shapes and geometry.
means i have to keep minimum details and prioritize on #1 clarity and #2 contrast. this affects my design for the universe, character and enemy design.
my biggest influence are: Monument Valley (for its elegance and simplicity), then Legend of Mana (for the warm feel).
EFFICIENCY 4: Fake-limitation styling (...well i guess not really)
i’m really sure about the terms, it’s like using GB, NES, 16bit style for our nowadays games. i know lot of devs like to do this for gimmick (palette only limitation), but little do this wholeheartedly (mimicking practices of old devs in screen transitions, dedicated sound bank, narration, UX presentation, etc). Shovel Knight is going full-ass on pulling NES feel.
for several things, limiting could spend less energy, sometimes it means we need to put even more effort to stay consistent with the direction.
i made several previous games with 16bit-era feel, but this time, i want the players to feel like they’re playing a Japanese PSX or GBA games.
(i think i have mentioned Legend of Mana like 5+ times on this log.)
(Sword of Mana!)
in my observation, or at least things what i find appealing on them, i make stereotypes for my own art guideline:
pixel sprites, pixel fonts, raster images are getting converted to compressed pics as well.
pixel sharp object edges (because they usually cut off alpha channel right?)
alpha/ transparency is all coded if possible.
256 max color palette. reuse color as much as possible.
crisp pixel art style (not much AA) + clear edges.
grid-less tileset.
not too many easing or smooth and slick feel, jumpy and snappy feel is more appropriate.
no fancy transition, dynamic lighting, lot of physics unless necessary for gameplay.
‘add’ and ‘multiply’ blending effects is allowed.
some asset scaling is allowed, if it’s pixel art, only use even number multiplier.
limited animation frames. (imagine if i have storage limitation to store game assets)
maybe i can add more later, the more i do research.
however i’m not gonna limit @leshlick to PSX or GBA audio feel. pretty sure he’ll come up with better vision.
to be continued...
maybe we’ll come up next with more gameplay, design, or audio related topics. to follow the project’s update more regularly, please follow #anuchard on twitter. thank you for reading my shit. i meant it. *_*)9
now enjoy another GIF of our hero is getting killed.
hi there, it’s Laz. welcome to my first post this year. let’s get quick without further ado before i changed my mind to not blog hahaha.
i’m going to write about our previous project before FLOU (here is previous post about FLOU by Rico, if you’re up to it) . this is actually not a new project as in we never talked about it. we were posting about this a bit on facebook back then (exactly around a year ago), with hash #projekhadoken, yet we lost track to post updates because we’re quite busy doing multiple project (FLOU, Stellar Arms, Fashion Yo!! and Layer), and doing pitches to potential sponsors.
it’s gonna be a long post, so yeah.
Brief about the project
so, what’s this is about?
here are a short recording Rico made for pitching, (hey pardon me for the glitched thumbnail) it’s not our newest, but at least it shows the gameplay. here is also the website that sums up pretty much all, except expansion part. (see below)
but because we need more cool images on this post, here are teasers for you also!
oh shoot it’s probably too long for your dashboard browsing, so i put a post break here for ya and you can thank me later for my considerations.
How we got the idea?
as i remembered, Rico prototyped this while we were developing Stellar Arms, also he said multiple times he was bored on prolonged projects and eager to make new quick game to raise our capital. (tbh we need money for Stellar Arms dev, which is our main project right now). also @kodoktua (cem) was aksing me whether we have project for collaboration, because he was, at the moment, quite free, so we decided to start another project, we called this #projecthadoken
you can see our early mockups there (using @stellararms‘s goey sprite lol)
Direction and planning
overall project direction
we’re always inspired by NITROME’s game (and i think i have said it before) simple mechanics, minimal content, arcade, and polished. we go their way, plus we add our own character on it.
art direction
i function as main artist, (i do the fighter sprites) along with usual allies: @regianart (Jubi) is drawing the main character and NPCs, and Cem designing fighters, map assets and most GUI.
i‘m here also to keep the consistency of the style; which currently is hmmm..tropical, “Breath of Fire 4 palettes”, oriental, tribal and lastly, 16-bit retro. it’s the second time i made UI (and UX) aiming retro feels, it’s hard because i used to make sleek transitions.
here are our early character concept arts mostly from cem:
getting close to current^
monetization
we target android device, but we don’t plan to self-release anymore. we aim for (big, if possible) publishers to handle the marketing side, since we’re all lazy ass to learn mobile market, and as we don’t like to be bothered on maintaining things we already delivered (like post-promotion, adding contents, statistics, etc). doesn’t mean we don’t fix bugs tho!
what went right?
last year, we’ve been showcasing this game’s (demo) several times on some gamedev events (it’s kinda rare since we usually too lazy to setup a booth) and the feedback was pretty good! we were also sharing the .apk demo to fellow friends they quite enjoy the gameplay, even though the assets were not final. they gave us input, and some laugh because they said we tricked them with the game presentation (HAHA GOT YA).
this project has the smoothest workflow except the way we messed up in months after-- see below.
what went bad?
honestly this project was a bit stall(as in, delivery).
we managed to do it right past early 2~4 months of development, we pitched for some mobile publishers, then we went to a halt due to contracts (we have to wait for feedback for months, then deliver, then wait another month, so on).
actually too good to be said as bad thing, we got pretty nice deals, (but we have to expand the contents) we were pumped up, but the publisher terminated the contract in the end (change of mind, but still in a good term with us) so we’re now planning on going to different publisher.
Progress and the Expansion
yes we expand the game due to (ex)publisher’s request. we originally had 2 characters only, now we add more aspects like new backgrounds, powerups, achievements, money and shop system, and most importantly, we add more 2 characters.
here are the new stuff we haven’t post anywhere before:
sooo.. currently we’re wrapping up the project right now, (yeaah polishing never ends!) and i write this actually to raise team’s morale. because... well we’re working on it for too long it’s exhausting.
i hope you’ll like it in when it delivers! just wait! :D
