Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of August 10, 2015

As I said last week, here we go! Let’s show off the talents of everyone on Team Jelly Paladin in one post. :D Going in chronological order of when they joined the party, first up is something new from Flora. It’s not actually going to be in the game (probably), but it’s my profile picture for the upcoming Team page!

Profile Pic

Yes, as it turns out, the clothes I wear in my own life are in fact as colorful as the crazy rainbow character designs I’ve pushed Flora toward. :P That Team page will be coming soon, but for now let’s move on to Becca!

Dreamblazers - Miharu Work In Progess August 2015

Here’s my current work in progress of the continent of Miharu! It’s looking loads better than a couple weeks back, naturally, but I’m still shuffling things around and considering what I can do with layouts.

Oh, by the way, the water tiles are animated too. =)

Dreamblazers - Miharu Animation Test

Now I can actually screencap this stuff courtesy of 1) ScreenToGif and 2) an update to Tiled. Actually, that update happened almost a year ago, but I didn’t realize that Tiled—at least for now—doesn’t notify when updates are available. Whatever the case, it’s a great program and I’ll probably have to add a Tools page too so I can give credit to all the excellent software I’ve been using.

Third up is the Tango sprite sheet I mentioned last week, coming from Alex:

Dreamblazers - Tango Sprite Sheet Triple Size

I spent a lot of time getting the continent ready as well as some other things yet to mention this post, so showing off his walking animation will have to wait for next week. Besides, who cares about a male protagonist in this female-heavy universe anyway? :P
(I’m kidding. Tango actually has an extremely meaningful role! It’s not a coincidence that he’s in the top row of my early character profiles group shot.)

Last up is Liz! But how can I do this when her newest art is technically a spoiler? Ah, I know. We’ll do it Pokémon style!

Who’s that Pokémon?

Dreamblazers - Mystery Monster Animation Silhouette

Dreamblazers - Mystery Monster Animation Silhouette Triple Size

I’ll give an additional hint with washed-out colors:

Dreamblazers - Mystery Monster Gigantic Ghost Silhouette

Wish I could show this mysterious creature off in its full-color glory since it turned out beautifully, but I just can’t give away spoilers! Look forward to another amazing creature that I can actually show coming soon, though. :D

That’s it for this week, shining a little spotlight on everyone. I don’t anticipate having much if anything to show off next week since family events are going to occupy the upcoming Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, but you never know what might be in store.

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of August 3, 2015

Dreamblazers - Slime Animations

Do the slime shuffle! These are new team member Liz Pulanco’s slimes shown at triple size and normal size. =) From left to right, top to bottom, they’re a Slimary, Slimectric, Slimercury, Slimerime, and Slimelty. These are some of the smallest creatures in the game, so we’ll get to see her work for Dreamblazers for bigger and more detailed sprites later on, but these are still adorable! And you can check out her overall talent on her website here.

Actually, it’s a little tough for me to believe that I’ve had these sprites since last Tuesday… time has been passing very quickly both because of my day job and some exciting things that are coming up in future posts but not quite ready for today’s post. I could put up the most up-to-date Miharu continent today along with the character sprite sheet for Tango that was finished last Thursday, but with the way things are going I’m hoping everything lines up so that next week or the week after I can do a nice mega-post spotlighting the talents of every team member so far with artwork both new and old. That’s something I really want to do in one big swoop; it’s been a while since a mega-post and I’ve mostly been posting more incremental updates recently, including today’s.

Enough about that and more about slimes, though! With a name like jellypaladin.com, you know I love these little blobs. :P Of course, our mascot and cover (kind-of-a-)girl Jelly was the model for the Slimary:

Jelly Wink

Even when I conceived a very, very basic version of the game back in 1999-2001, I always had the notion of using slimes as a form of tutorial (and I don’t mean the kind that flashes twenty text boxes at you; those didn’t exist back then).

The basic Slimary in Dreamblazers, as relatively helpless as it is, has one significant thing in its favor: the damage it takes from physical attacks is reduced by 95%! That teaches players very early that they can’t power through the game on physical attacks alone, then the elemental slimes (who also have that physical damage reduction) come in to teach about different types of magic!

An unfortunate fact is that many RPG series have virtually no gameplay depth and will allow just mashing “Attack” or “Fight” or hitting your strongest move turn after turn. That’s not something I can accept! You can expect more enemies than not to come up with at least one surprise, whether it’s a simple quirk of their stats like the slimes or a whole lot of AI options. (And the scary part is that I’ve given the Sylph Mage more options than she had back then due to new features added to ORK—but I’m not about to spoil everything!)

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of July 27, 2015

I guess one downside to having a bonus post, especially on a Friday, is that I don’t have much to update on Monday. :P Mostly just plugging away at maps and waiting on some art in the whopping one (work)day since I last updated. Once I have real finalized monster art to put in the game, testing battles using 2D sprites will become the next big project, so that will be a more exciting time.

One other thing: now that we’re up to five different people working on the Dreamblazers project, within the next couple weeks I’m aiming to put up a Team page with mini-bios of each person. =)

And I think that’ll actually do it for today. Short update this week, yes, but to be honest I probably need to cut back on these things anyway; with my time split now between making a game and my normal job, it’s a bit tougher to put up substantive weekly posts than it used to be for multiple reasons.

Bonus Post: Miharu Continent Work In Progress

MiharuFull1 Cropped

This is a bit rough around the edges—literally—because it’s still a work in progress and because there’s one very specific tile type I neglected to ask for, but I hope the beauty of Becca’s pixel art shines through regardless!

Compared to the old public domain placeholder tiles, you can easily see the upgrade in quality. The beach tiles that fade into the sea are noticeably larger than the sharp drop-off cliffs of the placeholders, though—this is merely a faithful recreation of the placeholders, but obviously I need to figure out how to expand the continent since Becca’s real grasslands need to fade into the beach more accurately. In some areas this is easy, like the area around Deltaru Tri-Port going from this skeleton layout…

Deltaru Beach Cutoff

…to this more fleshed-out terrain:

Deltaru Beach No Cutoff

But in other cases the beach is close enough to important terrain landmarks that instead I’ll be revising the area entirely, such as the forest just to the south of there: the Unicorn Forest, where it’s rumored that a rare unicorn lives! (Of course.*)

Unicorn Forest Area Cutoff

Normally I don’t show off such work-in-progress stuff, but I’ve gone so long delaying on sharing Becca’s pixel art because a lot of it would be spoilery—giving away dungeon layouts and so on—that I didn’t want to hold back any more. =) This is where we’re at now!

Oh: and in other news, I’m pretty sure our prospective monster artist Liz will be great based on her early samples. Look forward to that post coming soon!

(*Unicorn Forest used to be named Den of Kobolds and the Unicorn, but that’s super clunky and had to go. There are still kobolds hanging around all over, though!)

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of July 20, 2015

Earlier today Becca sent me some new overworld tiles, so I’ll do a take two on putting up a bonus post later this week with some updated images. =) Until then, though, I realized over this past week that even though I can’t show things like dungeon layouts for reasons of spoilers, I can show off Becca’s pixel art in another way…

Battlefield screens!

Dreamblazers - Forest Battle Mockup

Dreamblazers - Cave Battle Mockup

Look, look, it’s some of Becca’s artistry. :D I could put it to much better use than I have so far, believe me, but these are works in progress after all. Actually, in a way I’m worried what Becca might think when she sees this—I bet there are at least a dozen neat little visual tricks I could do with her pixel art that I haven’t figured out. Nonetheless, even for what I have so far they’re some beautiful environments, right? ♥

A lot of the vertical space at the bottom will also be eaten up by menus when I have real art for that instead of ugly placeholders meant for testing (not shown here :P), so the layouts are 100% subject to change. Also, each of these screenshots has a lot of empty space toward the left side since that’s where the enemies are going to be and I don’t know how much space they’ll take up.

Speaking of that…

Final Fantasy VI - Battle

…compared to this Final Fantasy VI image, you might notice that there’s a lot more visible horizontal space. Perhaps too much? Yes, I’d say so! To be honest, I’m not totally decided on what resolution or even aspect ratio Dreamblazers will be in, so I just designed a much larger space than needed. If I aim for a more SNES-like style, it could look like this:

Dreamblazers - Forest Battle Mockup SNES Resolution

A GBA-like style would look like this:

Dreamblazers - Forest Battle Mockup GBA Resolution

And a widescreen resolution would look like this:

Dreamblazers - Forest Battle Mockup Widescreen Resolution

But what if I end up going for the full 1920×1080? I could take that widescreen shot and crank it up to 400% size:

Dreamblazers - Forest Battle Mockup 1080p Resolution

Or I could go back and use a larger battlefield so that I only have to turn the pixels up to 300%:

Dreamblazers - Forest Battle Mockup 1080p Resolution Triple Size

I don’t know what I’ll end up with, but we’re one step closer to finding out if the prospective monster artist lives up to her samples! Being able to put in real non-placeholder creatures will help give me a better sense of space.