Constellations
Description
A 2D game based on environmental storytelling actively worked on by 4 people. A game about a cat going through 9 levels of grief to find peace. The cat must discover the truth about the place by going trough the levels, talking to NPCs, and discovering items.
Personal project that started from the idea of a cat game and got quickly into a story after throwing around some interesting toughts and fever dream like delusions with the current writer of the project. The story is still in process and changing as we go but the basics are decided.
Team
Helpers
Tools used:
Process:
The first thing we did with the project was creating a GDD that anyone could understand. The level ideas became clear even if we didn't have any art for them yet. Hours were spend on filling it up so that the game idea could be pitched to our programmer and audio lead. Quickly the team was decided as we understood what skills were needed for this game.
My job in this project is making sure everything is getting done and communicate between the members but mainly I'll be doing all the 2D art and UI for this project. For now I've been focusing on trying to get all the character animations done. I have finished 11 animations so far and still working on 3 more which are attack animations. They are technically finished but they'll need some final touches like action lines. There are still some animations left like climbing for both the player character and the enemies. The plan is to move mainly on level art next but also UI needs to be started.
It took me some time to find a way I like to animate things because frame by frame work requires a lot of time. The art style for this game is kind of paint like which is really difficult to get to be consistent. Even the tiniest changes in brush strokes between frames are visible so painting each frame individually was out of the question. I tried it for the first idle animation which ended up having way more frames than needed. I might have to redo it in the future to redece the number of frames (and the size of the animation) even if the difference doesn't matter at least for now.
However after the struggles with the first animation I had to figure out how to keep the cat looking consistent between frames and animations and so I created a bodypart sheet that I used. After the first animations I created I adapted a way of working which goes like this: research and rough red sketch of the animation frames, bodyparts on each frame on right positions defined by the red sketch, deleting the sketch layers, filling up the gaps between bodyparts, fixing any inconsistensies and creating facial expressions (if needed), and at last cleaning up the animation trying to make sure no frame has extra pixels flying around. This method might not be the best out there but it works for me and the animations get finished and look good.
The next step with the game was starting the levels. I tried to do two different tilemaps for the level but neither of them looked right even when I kept fixing them. The look was too blocky. I decided that we are going to take a more of a Hollow Knight kind of an approach and do layered backrounds with full pictures. It isn't necessarily the most space saving way but it looks the best out off all tries.
After figuring out our artstyle I made some assets for the first level that consisted of the first room and a short tunnel. I also made our UI, but I made it for a 2D UI course which means the UI hours are not recorded in Piiska. These are the initial designs we are using shown in the picture. The game was on DemoDay 7 after this course build.
For the DemoDay build I also made the 4 fight animations. 3 normals and a one long ranged one. In the video the process of the long range animation can be seen as well as the climbing in the gif. These both follow the style explained earlier with red rough sketch and then starting to fill it in with the premade bodyparts from the sheet. During the xmas holidays I also finished the climbing animation and scream animation for our next deadline.
After all the animations (needed for now) were done I finished planning all the levels and finished the art for our first level. It's still missing a piece but it's playable and that was our goal for now. We noticed a Bit1 competition and started building the game for that.
The second level was started; the star room, while Veera was working on the altar and fine tuning some mechanics I made the art which consist of 3 parts and 2 connector pieces. The altar room ended up being quite difficult for me to do because it has some many colors and those aren't easy to connect smoothly. The current design will be changed when I'll get a better idea but this will be used for the Bit1 competition.
For the Bit1 competition we also ended up adding a part of the third level; denial, with it's castle. For the demo it's in the wrong place but works out fine. We also added a gate to show our door mechanism. This version was tested by two other courses and we gained some valuable feedback.
