Iterations, iterations, iterations

As it always happens, I got very bad at keeping the dev log up to date. Hopefully, the bright red reminder on my calendar each week will remind me to do this way more frequently.

As it happens, me and the rest of the team spent the spring and summer finishing other projects and, more importantly, life things (things like becoming a father etc.). However, the project still kept on going, though on a bit slower pace, so now we have written out two of our chapters which we hope we'll be able to present in a demo this October on the Games from Croatia event on Steam. Fingers crossed!

The story is currently written with the help of the Dialogic plugin for Godot, which we will talk about more in next devlog posts.

On the visual side, I am slowly working on the style of the game. For a while I strayed away from the original teletext-pixel style because I wanted to explore different resolutions and clearer shapes. Turns out, it was pretty difficult to make 8 primary colours work together and still create a clear image, but each time I added bigger resolutions or more colours to the palette, the original appeal of the style would be lost. The process of creating something that sits in your mind will always require trying out some things again and again. With games, like other long-form art medium, you sometimes work better by finishing one part (and not being happy with it) and then moving onto the next part where solving one visual problem makes you figure out the past visual problem. 

In simpler terms, I avoided the background scene for the fighting match because the combination of light and shapes was impossible to figure out. Then I started doing other backgrounds, and realised the lines and the shapes always needed to be as simple as possible to make the style really pop. (Tried greyscale old timey photo style as well but ... it just wasn't it.) Then I went back to the fight scene with a much clearer picture in mind, and now I am pretty happy with how it looks! Now I am going back to the UI and then the characters with what I've learned while drawing out the backgrounds.

To see how far we've come and where we are going, I am also presenting one of the earliest versions of the game.

- Mih (QG)