Category Archives: Video Game Art

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of September 22, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Sent character feedback for Tango (round 3) and Minori (final)
* Updated all fashion effects that could be improved
* Updated fashion effects that previously weren’t possible
* Updated status menu layout

Current focus

Wrapping up art and the transition to 2D.

Sample stuff

The character designs for Minori Tsukimiya! Until now I’ve been showing off one design per character, but sometimes I get so stuck on choosing outfit elements that I simply ask for multiple variations. (I don’t know whether that’s more an example of Flora’s talent, my own indecisiveness, or equal parts. =P) In this case the variation is Minori’s skirt, but of all my characters, Cotelle has a variation top pattern, Leaf has a variation skirt and sandals and a kitty ear headband, Astrid has a second pair of sneakers, Leaf’s alternate outfit has a hair down variation and ballet flats, and Jig’s alternate outfit has a second color scheme. Maybe later down the road, when I’ve been showing off a functional demo, I’ll put these minor variations to a fan vote.

Weekly goals

* Send character design feedback for Tango, Jig, and Winter
* Update all applicable enemies’ AI to take advantage of new features
* Write bestiary flavor text for at least five enemies
* Figure out how to use 2D Toolkit (and other Unity assets if needed) to get basic top-down map movement functional

Comments

Back in action! =) The fashion effects proved to be even better than I anticipated, so rather than updating 15-20% of them, I updated 50-55% of them. I’ve set up the status menu layout about as well as I can expect, so I can leave that alone for now; the onus will be on getting art assets to make it something prettier than a bunch of solid colors that denote the size and shape of different menu sections. That’s for later, though. First I’ll update the enemies to take advantage of new features, then it’s back to the sticky situation of making 2D movement function properly.

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of September 8, 2014 (Post-Semi-Vacation Edition)

Last (two-ish) weeks’ achievements

* Sent character feedback for Eris (final), Misty (round 1), Minori (round 2), Mina (round 2), and Star (round 2)

Current focus

Wrapping up art and the transition to 2D.

Sample stuff

Eris Kenos on the right and a mystery character on the left. The mystery character actually won’t appear until the third game—if I get that far!—but since we stumbled onto her design, I decided to just go with her. =)

Weekly goals

* Send character design feedback for all pending characters (Mina, Minori, Misty, Star, Tango)
* Figure out how to use 2D Toolkit (and other Unity assets if needed) to get basic top-down map movement functional

Comments

Normally Hawaii is warm, humid, and rainy, but the recent hurricane seems to have disrupted the local weather—instead it was hot, humid, and sunny. Heat and sweat aren’t a great combination for productivity!

I’m mostly recovered and rejuvenated from the trip now, although I’m still adjusting to the time zone shift, so I’ll be getting cracking again. =) The character designs are first priorities since these should be the final ones with Flora and I fully expect to get them all—Mina, Misty, and Star are all especially close to being finished.

And then it’s back to understanding Unity. I’ve essentially taken two weeks off because of my trip, preparation for my trip, and cooldown after my trip, so hopefully I can transition smoothly back into the swing of it. x_x

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of July 7, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Sent art feedback for Kelly (final), Lash (round 3 and final), Faray (happy accident final), Jig (alternate outfit: round 3, final, minor revisions), Princess Leaf (final, minor revisions), Telia (round 4 and final), Tango (round 2), Minori (round 1)
* Sent art requirements and references for Eris, Star, and Mina (also coincidentally a model for the Imperial Uniform)
* Wrote but have not yet sent art feedback for Winter (round 1) and Eris (round 1)

Current focus

Character design.

Sample stuff

Click for full size!

From left to right, top to bottom: Kelly, Faray, Lash, two variations of Leaf’s princess outfit, Jig’s magical girl outfit, and Telia. Just try to match up the character classes: Artisan, Berserker, Hero, Paladin, Warrior, and Warrior Mage.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for Jig (normal outfit), Star, and Mina plus feedback for any updates that come back

Comments

Whoops! It’s a few hours past Monday here and I forgot about my weekly devlog. With the one precious transition month we have, my days and nights have blurred together into intense 12-14-hour sessions, so I lost track of time.

As seen above, though, it did pay off! We’re moving along like nobody’s business with six new finished designs. We had a total of thirteen before this past week, so that’s almost a 50% increase—and Eris’ first round was so solid that she’s almost completely done as well. Not only that, but we accidentally stumbled onto a near-finished Misty design during Winter’s process. Even if Flora doesn’t have time to go through with her (Misty), I’m still further ahead with her than I would have been otherwise.

Needless to say, I’m incredibly grateful for this bursting, hectic period of character design. My sleep may be troubled, but my soul is satisfied.

The remaining goals of this month are finishing Tango, Winter, Jig, Minori, Eris, Mina, and Star, then drawing the title screen image if we can fit it in. Because she’s my first artist, I’m giving Flora dibs on the first picture that every player will see.

Even though we technically finished six designs in the last week, all of them were deep into the creation process; out of these other seven, only Tango and Eris are well along. Still, I believe we can do it. Ideally I’d like to cram in one other character, but that’s just my idle hope—it might be unrealistic and I won’t be selfish with Flora’s time.

Only 23 more days of art await.

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of June 23, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Added hit rates to all existing damaging attacks
* Added critical hit rates to all existing damaging attacks
* Tweaked EP costs of ~80% of attacks that cost EP

Current focus

Character design.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for Tango, Telia, Kelly, and Princess Leaf; pending Flora’s availability, send in requirements for other characters, title screen art, or ending screen art

Comments

Positive battle progress for sure, but…

This week’s big news is that my wonderful character designer Flora informed me last night that she’s changing careers and will no longer be freelancing as of some time in August (approximately). Obviously I wish her all of the best! I’ll be hoping for her success in whatever she does and I’ve already prayed for the same and will continue to.

On a personal level, this hits very, very, very hard. As I write this sentence, it’s 11:33 AM; usually I don’t even wake up until 2:00 or 3:00 PM, so I can’t post these devlogs until 4:00 to 6:00, but I didn’t have the energy left to stay up late last night and I didn’t have the inner peace to not wake up early today. Drained and unsettled!

Flora will get a mega farewell email from me, that’s for sure.

On a professional level, I spent a few hours assessing how to move forward and we’re actually in about as good a spot as can be imagined given the circumstances. She and I finished (or will finish) designing various “groupings” of characters from the same social circles, so the foundation is at least 90% there and we can be very happy with that.

On the flip side, the groupings who we didn’t finish either didn’t start or pretty much didn’t start: we never touched the characters of a certain alien-like species, we never got to any non-humanoid creatures, we only did one of the serious antagonists, we only did one of the comedic antagonists, and we only did one of the superhero characters.

In other words, we focused extremely well on primary protagonists and important NPCs. Even if art style discrepancies creep in between Flora’s designs and another artist’s designs, any dissonance should be diminished because the characters themselves serve different roles.

With all of that said, Flora’s still here for now and she’s giving herself a transition month of dedicated freelancing to find fitting cutoffs with her clients, so I’m devoting all of my efforts to getting as much done with her as possible. I’ll do game dev stuff during any lulls between sending feedback and waiting for new drafts, but my main goal is to close out this artist relationship in the strongest way.

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 14, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Sent character profile and color scheme for Lash
* Sent round 2 art feedback for Leaf’s princess dress, final feedback for Autumn, final feedback for Astrid, and round 1 for Tango
* Slightly redid certain fashion effects to fix loop issues; fixed minor camera issue

Current focus

Battles!

Sample stuff

Character design for the goddess Autumn and Astrid Crys Alucia (click for larger)


Not drawn exactly to scale since I totally neglected to communicate Astrid’s height. =P I’m still wavering on whether to call Autumn and her sisters “goddesses” because it might not properly convey their power—they’re not tame Thor-tier characters, but they’re also not quite God-tier characters. They’re time-transcendent, multiversal, omniscient, and can warp reality and the laws of physics and magic (ergo de facto omnipresent), but they’re not capable of creating reality. Maybe “Entities” would be a better word.

Weekly goals

* Get at least ten attacks operational
* Get at least ten passive abilities operational
* Send in 50%+ of applicable art feedback for new rounds of stuff

Comments

This week: just because I say things like “I don’t know what I can expect to go right or wrong” doesn’t mean I’m any less surprised when things go right or wrong. =P

Until now, I’ve done all my testing with a one-character party to start small, but since I was delving into battles, I added two characters for more interesting dynamics. Before doing anything, the equipment menu revealed that fashion effects were kind of broken for the two new characters, which was especially strange since one of them was a clone of the one I’ve been testing with. I checked and rechecked the two characters and couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I decided I’d put that on the backburner for a while and jump into battles for the time being.

New problem: somehow I’d screwed up the battle camera to a point that getting new mechanics up and running would be impossible from my distorted, odd-angle view. This was also especially strange because I’d never touched the camera—I even checked to make sure. At first I thought it might have been related to spawn point settings I’d made in order to start the party right next to a battle, but nope!

Long story short, this week became half a retread of the week leading into March 24. Hunting through my ~300 fashion effects turned up that a few still had infinite loop issues, which broke the effects for the two new characters. The battle camera was also a consequence of the fashion effects for different reasons—simply giving battles ten times as much time to load (translation: 1 second instead of 0.1) so that fashion calculations could finish fixed it.

That final breakthrough happened on Sunday, so now I can get back into the meat of things. : D