As this is a (mostly) solo project done entirely in my spare time, it takes a back seat whenever I don’t have time or energy to spare (particularly the latter). ![]() In the last year I have changed jobs and cities for the second time since starting this project, and there have been several other important life events, not to mention world events. ![]() The last significant period of work was in March 2019, with just a few maintenance commits since then. Hello! It’s been a while but this project is not dead! After a few variations the best bet was this: What if the flow went in front of the creatures instead? Then it could be smaller and go straight down the middle. Most of the creature sprites touch all four boundaries of their 8x8 sprites which meant that the flow sprites had to as well so that a little bit of them would be visible around the edges e.g. So far all the designs I’d tried were completely behind the sea creatures. Having all these GIFs lying around is what prompted me to write this devlog! Anyway, it was becoming clear that small waves were the way to go. I used ScreenToGif to record these quick tests so I could put them all side by side and assess things altogether, as well as make sure I’m not trying the same things over and over again. I liked the intensity that the more densely packed waves had and how clear the boundaries were but they were too noisy with creatures on top of them trying to focus on the creatures became uncomfortable. The larger waves looked less like water and more like conveyor belts so those were out straight away. Note that we’re no longer pixel-perfect at a resolution of 128x128 (there’s sub-pixels in the scrolling) but this was just a quick temporary test. In case you’re wondering about the colors, I have a debug flag set so that a random avatar and case palette is chosen at startup so that I’m constantly confronted with the different designs and can tweak them if I see something I don’t like. I stuck some flows in level 1 for quick access and fiddled with the speeds and number of particles until I had this: I had a quick go at messing with Defold’s particle effects editor but I’ve never used it before and knew it would be quicker for me to try the effect I had in mind by rolling my own ‘emitter’ which just moves sprites along and respawns them when they go too far. When the player enters a flow they lose movement control until the flow spits them out or becomes blocked I figured some rapidly moving pixels would help convey the strength of the current. There can’t be that many options, right? Well there’s actually many more constraints than that, because it needs to fit in with the many existing sprites using up that limited palette, it can’t be too distracting because this is a puzzle game, plus you need to be able to tell which direction a flow will push a creature while the creature is on top of it and blocking it from view. OK so there’s only 16 colors and an 8x8 space and I need to make an animation for flowing water. Aseprite does do animations as well as tiling and many other features, it’s great but I’m still quite slow and clunky with it. It doesn’t do animations at all, but neither does my game for the most part! I’m now transitioning to what has become the industry standard for pixel art and for good reason: Aseprite. With the move to Defold and the need for larger, more complex pixel art I shifted to because I already knew how to use it, it was still simple and it had layers. Drawing at this resolution often feels more like solving a puzzle than artistic expression: how do you make a 2-frame crab animation in an 8x8 space with just one shade of red? These restrictions were what enabled me to start drawing pixel art in the first place when the blank page is this small it’s a lot less scary. You have a few banks of sprites, a few colors, a few tools and no layers. The PICO-8 pixel art editor is suitably simple. Many of the game’s sprites were first made in some form in PICO-8 and some have remained untouched in the ~2.5 years since then, such as the crab. ![]() I originally started the game in PICO-8 and so inherited the 128x128 pixel resolution and the excellent 16 color palette from there. But I’ve just wrapped the feature with some nice art and I thought I’d write about my pixel art workflow. I’m definitely going to write a post or two about both the design and technical challenges of this feature, because there were a lot of both. I call them flows because currents was too confusing during loop iteration. For the past few months I’ve been working on underwater currents: flowing water that pushes creatures and hook alike.
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