Devlog; Dead City

By Ember

I always feel like time is flying. When you’re a kid, it’s a sign you have a lot of fun, when you’re an adult, it’s a sign you’re behind your deadlines. So which is it?

After releasing Duat, I realized that Goblin Dungeon needed some refactoring, so I made it so you could launch battles independently of the game for faster playtesting. This is nice and you can even play as monsters now. In Duat, I let my partner design the maps and use my Tools. In doing so, I could observe her and realize I was used to doing some stuff in the wrong way and/or got used to a way that was making me lose time. I updated a bit on how I was using Tiled as a result.

I finished blocking out the mood for Dead City:

I wanted to have a dead city with purple and green colors, like Tim Burton’s deads, but in the end, it evolved towards something that steals from my favorite movie, the City of Lost Children. I’m pretty happy about the result, and I have a storyline and theme adjusting to this change.

The third level has been blocked out as well as you can see below:

The inspiration for this one is mostly the last tomes of Biomega and some Japanese legends about Rabbits on the moon. Quite a weird mix and quite a weird result isn’t it?

I made several new arts, for monsters and NPC and reworked the old art:

Even old Jarhed got cleaned up.

I also reworked the skills following playtest and gave them a slightly better UI. I am not entirely fixed on this, but it’s “good enough”.

I have been also working a lot on getting the Steam Page out, and contacted a bunch of artists. To know what to do, I’ve been following advice from this guy. I don’t know how much it’s worth, but it beats having no plan or experience. It’s pretty much invisible work, so I feel like slacking, but it’s important nonetheless. I hope it will be great :).

Also implemented a jump, it’s just fun.

Here is a small list of changes in the test version:

####2.3.0

  • Heal Animation
  • New sprite for Jarhed, Rapier Skeleton, Slime, Red Mice
  • New sounds
  • New Skill Buttons and animations
  • New Skills!
  • Numerous bugfixes!
  • Map updates

####2.3.1

  • Heal animation at the right size
  • Splash screen

####2.3.2

  • Fixed typo in thief dialogue
  • Reduce the size of the Goblin Sprite
  • Update second tower layout, occluder
  • Fix Elevator Glitch
  • Move a read sign to the correct position