[WIP] Sunblazer - Sprites and Light Devlog

[Olothontor]

Hello, all those that may faintly remember me. I'm back for a short while, after Flak (the old tileset hubbub) fell off the face of the Earth like most of my projects. This time, I arrive with, of course, a new project. This time, I've teamed up with Sirroelivan to brush up my spriting skills and learn a bit of GML in the process. Our goal is to make a small top-down arcade-style game based on DoDonPachi, Raiden, Raptor, and other kindred top-down games. This game shall be called... ::drumroll:: SUNBLAZER.

After some light pressure from Sirro ("You really think I should post them to Pixelation?" "sure, why not?") I've made myself a HQ on Pixelation, to get critique and to report back at semi-coherent intervals to update the general forum-going populous.




The small explosion template works great...



... The bigger one? Not so much...

[Lizzrd]

You should move the front wings down some pixels, four or so.

[Olothontor]

Mm, alright. Might I ask why?

Edit: Also, forgot to mention this before... edits are welcome, if you so wish to engage in them. Feel perfectly free to save the image, take a look at it, tweak what you will, and post again with an explanation. Just... please be sure to explain yourself in the process.

Edit #2: Ah, perhaps if the explosion STARTS big and then decreases in size. Hmm. That might work much better.

[Lizzrd]

Explosions would look better if  they were expanding and then a hole eats it from the inside.

[Olothontor]

That's what they do, Lizzrd.

Edit: Began playing with backgrounds... successful ISH, I'd say. I'm pleased with the results, but they still bug me a bit.



Also fixed the large explosion; the animation works MUCH better now, I think.

[Mathias]

So what was the death of your previous project? Feature Creep? Did the group's motivation wain?

It looks like you're focusing on details too much at this early stage in the game's development. How is the game as a whole looking? Is it all planned out with a Design Document written up or being written?

Looking good so far. This all looks better than Flak already.

[Olothontor]

I think mostly it was motivation, plus schoolwork. Although schoolwork is already starting to bog down this project, but I'd really like to prevail here, since part of my goal is to actually start trying to wrap my head around coding and programming, and my current partner is assisting me in that respect.

So far, Sirroelivan's still setting up details like the missile explosions and fire animations, just to make the game feel better. I appreciate you reminding me, though, I really need to update the design document. Thanks for your compliment, as well!

[Lizzrd]

No olo, you're having the explosion shrink. It doesn't look good that way.

Nice tiles btw, you might wanna clean them up a bit tho.

[Jad]

It's not necessarily realistic (or, ok, at all) but the shrinking ball for explosion is a very common video game stereotype so you can at least be safe and say it's all vidya legacy or something.

I think it looks nifty, I like how explosions and whatnot in video games don't have to look all realistic all the time.

Or we'd be stuck with either flashes, bangs and destruction (you know the realistic grenade kind, where something goes bang and then things break without all the fluff) or hollywood fire aspolsions all the time. I like the weird surrealistic ones born out of early arcade age guys having too few pixels and too little of a clue of how to make stuff look right. Etc etc. Just saying.

[Olothontor]

I appreciate the semi-sarcastic defense, Jad. I understand, though, Lizzrd, but I think I prefer this over a more realistic explosion.

Updated my background test image with more variation.

I think I need more cliff face.



Edit: Sorta fixed. Still seems odd, though.