Last monthly update of the year

It’s been almost a year since I started this monthly update thing, although I didn’t do exactly what I wanted, I worked on so many different things and learned a lot, I might write some kind of yearly review or something like that.

I’m pretty happy with my progress this month, unfortunately, there’s not much to show here, but if everything goes according to what I planned, I will have 2 prototypes to show on the next update. I can’t help but to work on 2 or 3 projects at the same time and for some reason I like doing it.

Anyway, here’s what I have to show

This month I decided to focus on pixel art, I wanted to have simple animations for a character and have them on GameMaker. Unfortunately, I couldn’t effectively predict how much time the character design would take, so I ended up with just the character. I will talk a little bit about the process.

Cool Character Reference

That’s the “feeling” I would like to achieve with the character, not that easy, specially with a 32×32 pixel art canvas. Below is my main character for the Midnight Journey Alpha.

Not that terrifying.

So… It doesn’t fit. I heard about the game “Hyper Light Drifter” and I liked it aesthetics and the character proportions, so I decided to follow a similar style.

HLD Character

I ended up searching some references, trying some drawings and ended up with a lot of sketches.

First round of sketches, just trying some forms

 

Second Round of Sketches, working on the sword and 3 specific forms

The Winner

The image above shows the one I liked the most and decided that I would use it (even with better feedback on other drawings). As you can see, I even tried an animation, that would be the dashing animation (It didn’t quite look good). But still, something was off for me, it didn’t look iconic or anything like that, so I decided to play more with colors and the colors I would use in the game.

The Real Winner

After aaaall of this, this is the winner, this is the main character for Midnight Journey.

So, that’s pretty much what I have to show on this update, took me like 2 or 3 weeks of sketching to decide how my character would look like

I will take a small break of a week or two to focus on finals and projects at University, and then I will be on Holidays! After that I will set some goals for the next update. I will try to use the extra time to put those prototypes together to post on the next update.

I want to start using more twitter for gamedev purposes, so follow me. I’m not sure how to do the transition from portuguese tweeting to english tweeting, I might just post random pictures and screenshots.

That’s it. See you next year!