This games development has been a bit of a mess over the last few years. Not only am I extremely disorganised, but I've also had mad life shit going on including moving to a new city, juggling day and night jobs sometimes not getting home until 6AM and commuting to back to London on weekends (anyone who lives in the UK will tell you transport is pretty hellish here).

Recently I've changed my tune about the way I work, planning ahead and setting goals, while it's completely against my nature, it's really worked out well and the game has gone from 'unplayable mess' to 'woah hey this looks like it might be a game one day'. I'm focusing on the first area of the game "Dusk Hill" which is fairly big and is probably about a quarter of the game.

Despite the fact I've been working on and off this project for a while, I'm gonna start keeping a regular dev blog here to keep people updated and so I can look back and see what kind of progress I'm making. ANYWAY, enough rambling, here's some crap.

Dialogue cut-ins



Here's a small selection of them, including the two main characters. I fucking love making these, it's probably madness to make them for EVERY NPC you meet but whatever. I'm a comic artist more than I'm a game designer so this kind of thing is important to me. I'm not entirely happy with Merlot's design (first one, main playable character) so expect her to change. She's supposed to be a little moody but she looks like something crawled up her ass and died here. A lot of the games BGs and tilesets are really purple too so I'm considering changing up her colours up to compliment that and stand out a bit.

Enemy Design



These are also a blast to make. I wanted to make this entire game by myself originally but I was getting a bit overwhelemed. My best bud skeletonhouse (they're currently working on concept art for a project with Christine Love at the moment so I'm absolutely honoured they're taking time out of their busy schedule to help me out) has been designing some rad looking enemies for me. Pixeling someone elses work was really intimidating at first but I feel like it's helping me grow as a pixel artist and I feel the designs really compliment the game.



They send me a flash sheet of pencil sketches, I do lineart over them in MS Paint, remove the pencil in Photoshop, put it back into paint and do the detail. Some of these need a little work on my end but I'm really happy with them. Still slightly unsure of how I should go about the main party battle sprites, think it'll take some experimentation. I was thinking of some almost River City Ransom (Street Gangs) style battlers, or like the sprites you get in old SNK Neo Geo Pocket fighting games. If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to shoot them my way.

Anyway, that's enough for the moment. Like me, these blog posts are probably going to be quite messy and probably just end up throwing whatever random crap I feel like at the time on here.

Peace out rmn, thanks for reading xxx