Unstable Scientific

  A development blog for the retro-style platform game where you and your colleagues build a lab to test the unspeakable horrors in the universe next door.  

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It’s not quite done yet, but here’s a comb jelly enemy sprite animation for the “bubble” level!

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I just updated Lev’s main walk cycle for the first time since the project’s inception!  I drew a non-pixel art walk cycle of Lev for reference before I started, just to make sure that the sprite was more life-like.  The walking pixel sprite on the right is literally the first animation of Lev I did for the game.  Does it look like there’s progress?  

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Going a little bit wild with the cutscene sketches tonight!

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What has your weekend mood been like?  Various expressions for the main characters for the in-game conversations and eavesdropping!

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I’m having fun making NPCs today! This guy, head of the secret semiconductor lab, needs a name.

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Animated bramblebush hazard, before and after the changes!  Players weren’t really recognizing the regular bush as a hazard (the one below), but a friend said that if it was animated it might work better.  So I made this crazy undulating monstrosity that had multiple complex animations.  That is, some of the vines are intertwined and cross over on top of each other.  I didn’t realize how tricky that kind of thing is to animate until it was time to add proper outlines and color!  I might go back and add the brightest highlights and fix a couple of the glitches I JUST NOTICED, but for now I’m just glad to see it alive and moving!

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Just for fun an animation sketch of Tau running! 

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Pixel’s quantum entanglement lab for the home base area in Unstable Scientific.  I really had to push my imagination hard with this one, because most of the time in labs like this you only see things happen via the instruments! 

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Lev and Tau’s Vacuum Resonance Soliton lab, tiny island edition.  Making progress on the game Unstable Scientific!

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RATE MY SETUP! It’s Chandra Cassini’s lab for the home base area in Unstable Scientific.  She studies the cosmic microwave background radiation, searching for signs of early collisions with another universe!

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This is Pixel’s chemistry lab, for the home base level!  That’s Pixel with a sort-of randomly generated NPC for flair on the left.  I had so much fun using references from photos I took in actual labs, though I took a lot of artist liberties to make the animations more dynamic.

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I just animated this fabric-creating device that’s going to be in Pixel’s chemistry lab. I actually had to look at a number of real devices that manufacture nylon and weave it, and then combine them into this fictional “absurdium-weave” device. How do industrial designers working for film and video games do it?

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Yay Unstable Scientific update!  I’m so proud of this right now.  Even with the craziness of early autumn, I still managed to get this rogue semiconductor lab animation finished.  Vapor deposition chamber, spinning band column extraction thingy, and inert-gas-glovebox!  This cute little background animation took more work than 85% of anything else I’ve made in the game so far!  

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I made an animation of a toxic spore bursting!  When I design the SFX, I frequently export the WAV file and import it into Premiere to make sure that the timing is correct for all the little sections - inflation, moment of burst, etc. 

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I created a system in Photoshop in order to generate sprites of custom NPCs with a wide variety of assets such as hair and clothing, all without writing a line of code! 

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I love using Procreate on the iPad for storyboarding and just going over the top with lighting effects. It's so much more fun than straight pen and ink!

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I’m not really a coder, but I don’t want to have to wait to see how the background art will look when it scrolls - and I want to troubleshoot it before it gets to Dustin.  So I made a little Processing sketch to see how the landscape will scroll. It’s not perfect, can only do horizontal (not vertical parallax), and has a weird bug, but effectively gets the job done. You can use it for your project, just replace “homebase_background_0x.png” with your own file names in the Processing directory.  Backgroundpic5 = the most distant part of the image, backgroundpic = the closest.  Make sure the files are all the same size and are at least 800x800 px.  Uh, if you have less than 5 pictures...just delete the other sections?  If you have more, add more sections and change the variables in the formula?  Crap!  I’m not really a coder!!!

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iljbYzBnrxo4iI6ib9gS7tV27N3WciKF