Started working on some animation for my Character. Very rough shape blobs to get motion down before I try to go in pixel by pixel.

Not feeling well the last couple days & I fell behind on daily art/dev posts, Catching up tomorrow. So I wanted to show off some work I did for Mutant Studios next game. 3 colors/character 32 colors max at once, palette swaps for players/level.

Testing out converting my first ever 3D character that I made years ago to my first ever 16-bit character. Palette is currently incorrect as this is a draft. C&C completely welcome and wanted. Still adjusting to this pixel world from 3D.

Working on creating a SNES era style platformer in Unity. Picked up Pro Motion NG during the steam sale to try it out, decided to start learning today and I wanted to get rid of my temp ladder tiles.

More learning in Pro Motion NG, loving it so far. Moving stuff over to tiled to replace my programmer black and white art. I made my own Tiled Importer so tomorrow I'm probably going to play with throwing this into unity. Still new to pixel art so any tips are super appreciated.

I want to build a character generation/customization system. I haven't figured out what exactly to focus on, so I'll be using my new iPad Pro to draw some faces for the next couple of days to inspire myself.

Set out to do an Avatar then got bored...

Getting back to gamedev.

Today I did a big brainstorming session with a friend.

We want to make a chill/zen co-op multiplayer game where the players build a self-sufficient ecosystem by helping each other.

Attached: mindmap of the brainstorm (in french sorry)

Too lazy today.

Seems I accidentally submitted to the daily DJ streak and the monthly one. Can't submit a new post, so...editing time!

Original Post:

Rust learning picks up again after an unsuccessful Ludum Dare weekend (thanks, health). Going to aim for steady progress going forward on both learning and developing new things.

April Review:

A lot has happened this April, though I have little concrete to show for it.

A vastly improved knowledge of Rust and engine building has made me interested in using Rust for many projects. Most of my streak posts have been about Rust, and I've enjoyed it greatly.

Ludum Dare went poorly, in part because I attempted essentially constructing a Rust engine on top of two frameworks that I barely understood. I'll be taking some time away from jams for now (Decade Jam aside), and I expect I'll be heading into the next several only with tools I'm fairly solid on.

The real victory this month has been using Anki to learn Rust and Toki Pona (a tiny conlang). Rust in particular has been a nice surprise - my health is now less of an obstacle with the knowledge so well embedded in my head through spaced repetition and so frequently reviewed. I need to apply the same treatment to C# and GDScript, as well as algorithms, design patterns, and more. Game design itself I can do to a decent degree of success all the time, thanks to years of constant thinking about it, so it's a matter of being able to implement what's in my mind.

Productivity is my goal for May, with an emphasis on product. The Decade Jam Community Project Task Force is ~~steadily lengthening its acronym of DJCPTF~~ hammering out the final details of our game and I am even now working on early code for it. Test projects for a custom engine are underway as well, and I expect to have multiple test games to show off in next month's summary post.

While I expect to continue to focus on Rust and Godot, I am not opposed to a return to Unity or Phaser as well. I hope to construct a strong portfolio over the next two months, and while I think my skill in game design, mechanics, and AI are solid (always worth improving, though), I think my generalist knowledge is another strength. I'm trying to be a T-shaped person, as some say. Being able to work across several engines and frameworks will not only improve my skills, but make me more likely to be available to help with a particular task or job, plus help others cross such divides.

Here's hoping for plenty of productivity next month.

Lots of iterations today. Here is the current state.

I also did some work on my tiled xml importer for unity. It now supports multiple layers from tiled so I can create things like spawn points and enemy locations, still needs some work on that end though.

Enemies now bite back!

Also, there is rudimentary sound, which gives not as much depth as I had hoped. Anyhow, enjoy the changeset and the gif.

https://github.com/Papiertig0r/Alchemy/commit/84a77c87a50b5717ac46a0c8d838bc1c44717266

I did only minor work and it still took me one and a half hours :/ not happy with the speed

I want to implement mechanics! Also I'm thinking of changing to Scriptable Objects for Ingredients, Tools and Items.

Also, I need to find out how to prevent Canvases from overlapping (I want the inventory to find the best space where it occludes neither the toolUI nor the player).

Also, I want a Custom Editor for Ingredients because I'm interested in the topic :D (I have a few ideas).

Check out the changes here:

https://github.com/Papiertig0r/Alchemy/commit/63e8...

p.s: the Tool UI in the gif now stays with the tool, I changed that after making the gif

Also: Progress bar of the tool just fills over time, no actual meaning behind it (hopefully this changes tomorrow)

Refactoring code to make it not just a bunch of gigantic static classes with a million static functions. Breaking apart code into smaller chunks for clarity. I realized with how asynchronous this game is it will quickly get out of hand if I can't keep everything organized. So-far, so-good. I think I'm on the right track.

I implemented Ingredients and Tools. Add an ingredient (e.g. a herb) to a tool (e.g. a mortar and pestle) and you can change the attributes of ingredients (well, almost, there is no actual logic for changing attributes but all the containers are ready)

Missing is: Tool UI, UI interactivity, some proper attributes and an Editor for phase transitions (currently it's with lists of custom container classes)

No gif today because you can't see the changes xD

watch them on github instead:

https://github.com/Papiertig0r/Alchemy/commit/dc41...

is the mother of every product... or so?

I wasn't particularly fond of my last submissions so I decided to not program anything but rather spend some time in planning until I know what I want to the fullest detail.

Also, I decided to delete all the UI stuff because it was getting pretty convoluted and concentrate on the mechanics. When I know how the mechanics work, I can reimplement UI

When I had to guess, I'd say I lanned about 50% done and I'm happy with the results, planning makes thing so much easier.

No changes today, no github link

Didn't have much time so I traced some more tiles. The entire eastern coast is done. I realized afterwards I really should have been working on the West since that's where the next turn will be played out and I need some tiles to move to for testing. So that's what I'll work on next.

Was lacking motivation after working all day and going to class, but I still managed a little bit of work:

* Added 6 more (free!) classical songs from www.ourmusicbox.com. Brings the total up to 12, which I think is enough diversity.

* Started porting to iOS. All I did was pull the project down from SVN on my mac pro, build an xcode project, and make sure it actually compiled. It actually took 2 tries because Aniballs had an outdated version of the Lunar Console 3rd party asset, but going to the asset store, doing an update, and recompiling just worked. Bottom line: the iOS build compiles, but I didn't even run it yet (the wife's Lightning cable was 1 room away, and I was lazy).

Tomorrow, I'll tackle actually testing on iPhone, making the Apple Store page, etc. Maybe I'll even submit it for review. Then its just down to shooting a new video, and releasing this thing!

Completed:

• Tiles in-game now have a nice border around them. This is so you can actually tell territories apart.
• Created some of the game piece artwork. Bomber, chopper, and city icon. These will be rendered to a sprite instead of imported as vector art.

What I don't like:

• I wasted time upgrading Unity thinking an issue I had was due to an outdated version. Answer is inconclusive but hey, I'm running the most updated version now.

Things I need to think about:

• Some game pieces look better from the top down like the bomber and chopper. Others are going to look better from the side like a troop or mech vehicle. In real life the 3d plastic pieces work well. I guess I'll just have to live with the different perspectives for the 2d game unless I think of something clever.
• How to represent a city. This is another one where in the real world the plastic pieces look nice and make it easy to see if a city is on the board or not. I drew the blue icon that is printed on the game board signifying a city territory. I may play around with changing it's color? A top down view of the city plastic piece will look like terrible (just a bunch of rectangles).

Coming next:

• More code work instead of art. I think I've got enough for placeholders.

Completed:

• Infantry game piece art.
• Hover tank game piece art.
• Troop transport (mech) game piece art.

Things to figure out:

• Do I do a different piece for the partisans or just color the infantry piece gray (leaning towards that solution).

Drawing the game pieces has been quite fun. A nice change from the coding. I'm not 100% satisfied but they turned out much better than I anticipated. They will at least work for the initial game. I didn't really have an art style in mind but I do like the flat color and clean lines (the troop kinda breaks this a bit but still feels like it fits in with the others). I honestly don't want too much detail for the pieces as there will already be a lot going on with the board and I don't want a bunch of rendering artifacts when zoomed way out.

I implemented a simple Inventory with UI

it might be a bit hacky, but it does the trick :D

current latest commit:

https://github.com/Papiertig0r/Alchemy/commit/4fed...

Finished off the Rainforest Pack with these 4 new Aniballs

This is the full pack now: