Way of the Hunter

red moon

Member
For my next demo, I want to create an experience that is more in line with a survival exploration adventure. I want most of the player's time spent to be on exploring, hunting, crafting and fishing with less focus on destroying enemies to advance to the next screen.The primary goal will be maintaining your health and other conditions that effect travel.

I created most of the images you see here to better understand how to go about building something like this and the end result will differ greatly. There will be many visual and game play system problems to look at and if may be some time before I get things running. I will do what I can to post updates as I move forward! And I will continue to fix and update Mark of the Beast as well.

The first image you see was my original thumbnail sketch I did to try and capture the idea.
 

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red moon

Member
I'm drawing out some test pieces this evening to begin cutting up and assembling the initial graphics banks to look at changing color on a single tileset or if I need to make 3 tilesets.

I'm going to try to use dark brown rather than black as the persistent shadow color to start. Then I will get the player in there moving and an Elk and rabbits maybe....
 

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red moon

Member
Thank you Baardbi!
I really appreciate it. It may be a bit much for a demo to start with, but I wanted to think things out visually as much as I could before I started in editor. Also, I was holding out for the new updated version as well which I wanted to use to create this new demo and still may once its out. I can start prototyping now either way, and move the assets over later.

Visually, things will look more "NES" once I shift the above colors to the nes palette in editor. I draw out most of the art on my phone during lunch then cut it up and put it into editor at night once I am home!
 

Dirk

Member
Oh wow! I am blown away by your concept art and your test screens! Really nice work! Thank you for sharing, it I really love seeing how your games come to life.
 

red moon

Member
Thank you so much Dale,
I am excited to be starting something new and something that is very different from Mark of the Beast as well!
 

red moon

Member
I've been working on some of the sprite elements i wanted to share here. I drew out the pickup objects but I think I will end up scaling them down, they seem a bit too big at the moment.

I started a pass on NPCS and some human type enemies:
Elder
wounded man
Trader/Merchant
Enemies:
Wendigo
Skinwalker
Darkness (large and small)

As well as some of the starting wildlife.
Fish
Snake
Bison
Bear
Wolf
Fox
Rabbit
Deer
Elk
Turtle
Bird

i also started testing some of the tiles and limiting the palette- since all pieces will use elements of the ground color I am looking at maybe 6 colors + ground color or the total screen. The ground is difficult ( i cheated a bit with the winter scene here) and will require some experimentation for sure. I am playing around with using 4+ tiles just get some patterns on the ground since there will be a good deal of it!
 

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Dirk

Member
Very beautiful sprites <3
I wonder how the big sprites will fare in action. As I'll have some animals in my game I find it very interesting how others implement them.
I love your animals sprites. It always amazes me how much a talented artist can express just with 3 different colors.
 

red moon

Member
Thank you Dirk! I really appreciate it. And I am wondering that myself my previous sub bosses where large and had some issues animating when they had more than 4 frames for any given animation, so I keep an eye out for any weird behavior.
And I am enjoying working on these so far, they are very different from Mark of the Beast for sure!
 

red moon

Member
I did a couple more tests this evening, I am going to tackle the ground areas later or keep them more simplified like these river and meadow segments. I will need to scale down certain enemies for sure, the wolf is massive!
I'll already reduced the fish and rabbit seen here in these test screens.
 

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NeoBenj

Member
Hello red moon.
Just... wow. I did not notice yoru posts until today. Stunning graphics.
I also like the uniqueness of the ambiance. I like you have animals as enemies (like in my game, hehe :) )

Are your screens only mockups? Or real screenshots?
Because I would be interested to know how to implement a "half health point" system.
Not a full square but a half square like on your screens. :)
I briefly looked at the code of the HUD, but there was so many variables I got lost and gave up (for now) :D
 

Dirk

Member
My main character is a fox and my first draft was huuge. I kept reducing him and he became better and better. When I was finished I made a small and quick variant just for fun and it worked better. So now my fox is basically boiled down to his essential pixels^^
 

vasge_

New member
Wow, these are looking great red moon! Thanks for sharing the concept art, I always like seeing what type of pre planning other people do when making a game :D
 

red moon

Member
Just... wow. I did not notice yoru posts until today. Stunning graphics.
I also like the uniqueness of the ambiance. I like you have animals as enemies (like in my game, hehe :) )

Are your screens only mockups? Or real screenshots?
Because I would be interested to know how to implement a "half health point" system.
Not a full square but a half square like on your screens. :)
I briefly looked at the code of the HUD, but there was so many variables I got lost and gave up (for now) :D

Thank you! I appreciate it and love what you have going on with Rangers! I am hoping to do some of the problem solving with shape, scale and object types in this stage so the work goes fast once I am "in editor only" mode! And these are just mock ups, I build a template in photoshop with a 16 grid frame for 256x240 and I am literally just snapping n blocks copied from 128 x 48 sheets. The big change will be color palette shifts, which I don't mind so much because it will look and feel more like an nes game then! And for the incremental life bar, I will need to look into that as well...I am hoping to use three 8x8 tiles for 2 bars, 1 bar, empty and have the tiles cycle as the player takes damage.
 

red moon

Member
Dirk said:
My main character is a fox and my first draft was huuge. I kept reducing him and he became better and better. When I was finished I made a small and quick variant just for fun and it worked better. So now my fox is basically boiled down to his essential pixels^^

Hey Dirk, good to hear from you and I would love to see the before and after of your fox! I find the concept and changes that occur to be really interesting!

Initially, i was trying to use as much space as possible to get as much detail in as I could in each sprite but after placing them into the environments it seems that scale and overall silhouette are far more important. So, my wolf will need to be close to the size of my fox and the fox will need to come down in size then the rabbit as well. It sort of has a trickle down effect!
 

red moon

Member
vasge_ said:
Wow, these are looking great red moon! Thanks for sharing the concept art, I always like seeing what type of pre planning other people do when making a game :D

Thank you Vasge, I loved seeing the concept art from your character and environment shot with the temple, really inspiring stuff! And some of my pre planning is drawing and sprite work in my car during lunch time then do some quick assembly tests once i am home!
 

Dirk

Member
red moon said:
Hey Dirk, good to hear from you and I would love to see the before and after of your fox! I find the concept and changes that occur to be really interesting!

I'm planning to make a WIP thread in the future and I'll surely post progress pictures of my fox. It will take a while though, as I am swamped in work right now.
I'm hoping I'll find enough time to make something for the upcoming Byte Off contest.
 

Dirk

Member
Oh, what I forgot to mention... I find the way you made your ground tiles very instructive. I tend to think "I have three colours, so I have to use them!", where it's totally fine to use just one colour and use the others for added details every once in a while.
 
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