Whoopsie daisy, it’s been a bit too quiet. We’re still alive and working.
REAL LIFE, EPISODE 123
Ooh boy… Sorry about the radio silence. There’s been a good reason for it though. Not too long after our previous blog post, due to outside forces I had to take a roughly four month break from Gerty to take part in a little game development course. Long story short, I had a good time, met new people, developed a small game, but now I’m back in the saddle! While I was away, Risto took some time to work on another project as well. He ended up doing some programming for our friends over at Happy Hobgoblin for their upcoming VR/PC co-op game Icesolation. In addition to that, he also added a bunch of features and tweaks to the game:
- Added save game functionality when quitting during a run
- Enemies now rotate smoothly while walking
- Increased game difficulty choices from 3 to 5 for smoother difficulty
- Added Steam API integration
- Tons of localization work
MONSTER GRAPHICS REPORT #3
Our work on the monsters of World 1 is finally done! (Save for all the tweaks and such later) Here’s how the roster looks at the moment.
We’ll most likely re-color most enemies at a later point, to make them more easily distinguishable from each other, which is a problem I’ve talked about before. There will probably also be some minor changes to a few characters.
On that note, you might notice one particular character missing from the shot…
REWORKING GRONGO
The final item on our World 1 list is the head honcho himself: Grongo the Slayer. Though it was quite a bit of “extra” work to redo him from scratch, I think it’s paying itself off pretty well so far. Though the main point was to make him more visually in line with the rest of the roster, it’s given us an opportunity to refine some of his shortcomings and add a few new animations.
Like with the rest of the original monsters, Grongo’s original animations weren’t the most detailed. Also, ever since our original artist left the project, we haven’t been able to fix some of the errors in his animations, like bad looping or clipping.
In addition to all that, I wanted to make Grongo’s animation feel a tad more intimidating/threatening. Hopefully that’s apparent when comparing the two walk cycles above.
There’s still a bit more work to be done though. I’m currently about halfway through animating him, the texturing could use a bit more detail and there’s some modeling changes to be done (in the weapon in particular). Overall though, we’re making good speed.
SUMMARY
There’s a lot more detail I could go into about what’s been happening in the last half a year (or so), but I’ll spare you this time – I’m planning on getting more into the nitty-gritty in our next post. If luck has it, we’ll have some info on World 2 enemies by then too.
Till next time, folks!
