Sinner’s Sorrow is an atmospheric 2D action adventure game currently in development for PC (Win/OSX/Linux). In Sinner’s Sorrow you are a sinner fighting for your redemption. Set in a dominantly black and white and ominous world, you take up arms against your inner demons. With sword and shield and a multitude of esoteric abilities you strike down those that stand between you and redemption, or fall into deeper darkness.
Sinner’s Sorrow combines the intensity of dynamic action combat with a heavy atmosphere and aspects of puzzle solving, light platforming and influences from the Metroidvania genre.
Sinner’s Sorrow is being developed by bitHuffel’s Ruud Koorevaar and Anton van Es.
Currently the game is in its early development phases. Stay up to date on the game’s progress by subscribing to the newsletter!
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Furthermore, as the game is still quite early in development we will also send out questions and such out to you all regarding certain design decisions for the game. We are open to all options at this point and we want to involve you in making the game you would like to play.
bitHuffel is a Dutch game development studio with a varying cast. The previous project, Zenzizenzic, was solely developed by Ruud Koorevaar and published by Adult Swim Games in the Summer of 2015. For Sinner’s Sorrow, Anton van Es is added to the team to take up art, animation and general design. A publisher is not yet involved with the project.
This project is a giant leap forwards in the resume of bitHuffel and we are hugely excited to share the game’s progress and eventually present you an amazing experience!
Sinner's Sorrow is a game that relies on setting up a heavy and tense atmosphere. One of the methods we use to achieve this is with the lighting.
Sinner’s Sorrow is an atmospheric 2D action adventure game currently in development for PC (Win/OSX/Linux).
Below you see a simple tree branch and a couple of rocks to the left. Here you can see how the light bends around the objects and creates the illusion that we are looking at objects with mass and depth as if existing in a 3D plane, while they are still 2D images. This creates some cool possibilities to play with the lights and how they create situations for the player. For instance, what if all the lights suddenly went out and you find yourself in near darkness, relying on a small source of light that you have on you? Good luck not getting tangled up with something nasty hiding in the darkness!
This method of lighting is achieved by using something called a normal map. A normal map is a variant image of the regular image used. This variant gives the image the necessary information to react to lights passing by. For instance, the regular image and the corresponding normal map for the branch look like this:
We use SpriteDLight to automatically generate these normal maps as creating these manually is a bit too much. These images are then combined in a single shader which has parameters that can be adjusted to alter some of the image properties (such as how intensely it reacts to lights or how much the light wraps around the images). This can all be adjusted in real-time.
The lighting in Sinner’s Sorrow is a core component of the game to create the atmosphere, facilitate gameplay and set up an engaging visual style, even more so because we are working with a black and white style which brings challenges of its own. But with this style we can set up some awesome and surprising encounters.
As a teaser for what you may find in your path, below is part of a scene we are currently working on. Note that due to unavoidable video compression the in-game result actually looks a lot nicer!
Ps. If you missed the reveal trailer, you can check that out here:
Sinner's Sorrow, a 2D atmospheric action adventure, is now unveiled with a reveal trailer! In Sinner’s Sorrow you are a sinner fighting for your redemption...
Stunning aesthetic and the game itself looks great so far.. can't wait to see more of it.
Good luck with the ongoing development.
Great job so far!
Been following you for a while now Ruud. Keep it up!