forked from ohayo-jacob/takunomi-blog
36 lines
3.6 KiB
HTML
36 lines
3.6 KiB
HTML
<p><time datetime="2021-11-21">2021-11-21</time></p>
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<p>Progress has been good recently.</p>
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<p>BACKGROUNDS AND COLORS</p>
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<p>For a long time I’ve struggled with how to paint backgrounds. In the last post you saw another attempt. An attempt I am admittedly proud of, but I believe it doesn’t work in a number of ways, that are connected with the rest of this post.</p>
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<p>It’s a question of fidelity and skill. The most important part is that I am not a very good artist (in a number of ways). Beyond that I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to this game. I’ve designed the monsters and the girl as best I could, and I believe they work decently for their purpose. Painting 3-4 different landscapes however, was simply too daunting. I finally got started, and the result was as you saw before. It’s not ugly, but neither is it amazing. I don’t scuff at “good enough”, but unfortunately, I believe I hit a fidelity that I can’t keep up with. Furthermore, I think it all became too much: Too vibrant, too colourful, too detailed. The characters, the foreground, the background, the UI.</p>
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<p>Cave Story and Kero Blaster always comes to mind for me. Pixel is a great artist, but he is also great at restrain. I want to achieve something similar to that. I then came across Arne Niklas Jansson's (androidarts) fictional console, the Famicube. Without explaining too much, it provided me with a decent, 64 color palette and some technical restraints, that I tried to apply to my own art.</p>
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<p><figure>
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<img src="https://takunomi.space/images/game1/famicube.png" alt="" border="0">
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</figure></p>
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<p>I believe the experiment is a success. There's a greater cohesion entire roster, and when I went back to the background with a meat cleaver, I achieved something that is a lot relaxing to the eye. Below is a little mockup.</p>
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<p><figure>
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<img src="https://takunomi.space/images/game1/fami_mockup.png" alt="" border="0">
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</figure></p>
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<p>WORDS</p>
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<p>Then there was the question of story and dialogue. I hate writing dialogue. I am not a writer, and I don't want to tell a story with this game. Yet I also realise that context is important for the player. Furthermore, I spent a long time trying to systemise and gamify the progress of the overall game. It never clicked. It wasn't fun as a meta game, and it was a lot more resource intense than trying to write some dialogue. At least, so I thought. After a lot of iteration, I've finally arrived a level of detail in the dialogue (which I try to keep sparse) that doesn't make me ache when I read it, and gives enough context for the how and the why and the where. I have an outline for an article on about "narrative as a gameplay container", that I want to write, but haven't quite figured out yet. In either case, this dialogue approach has allowed me to feel like the first world is basically done (yay!) and to move on to the second: The City.</p>
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<p>THE CITY</p>
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<p>This is the final thing I've been working on. Both to design and implement the levels of world 2, but also to paint the map in a, again, a level of detail and presentation that I can handle. My girlfriend took a shot at fixing the map I already had, and though we clashed on the style I wanted, her input definitely pushed in a direction that I far more appreciate now. It's grid-based (16x16 pixel tiles) and (of course) uses the Famicube palette.</p>
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<p><figure>
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<img src="https://takunomi.space/images/game1/river_area_map.png" alt="" border="0">
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</figure></p>
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<p>As I noted on Twitter, it's based on my memory of staying in Kyoto for a couple of weeks, ten years ago, right around the great earthquake. Dear lord I loved that city.</p>
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