Hey everyone, Ryan the Art Guy here with another development check-in for Blackmask for the past January month!
Adam and I have been in the water, so to speak, building a little swimming hole for Cole. Adam’s been refining the underwater movements and building rough level setups for this tutorial island we’re making. We meet up as often as we can to bounce gameplay ideas off each other to figure out what could be fun to do.
I’ve been tackling new pixel assets for underwater backgrounds. As with the surface tree backgrounds, the bottom of the water is build to be a seamless horizontal loop. I’m not as satisfied with the look without more details to make it look more underwater, but the broken statues are a fine start.
Continuing forward with a vertical cliff side area, I made the cliff assets as end caps to the horizontal scroll. It looks natural enough, with deep shadows to fade into other areas as needed. I also made some vertical statues embedded in the rocks to mark the entrance to the temple area.
I might’ve made a mistake not keeping some character sprites around for scale, because these BG’s look huge! Smaller assets need to be made, but I can chalk this up to giving the game verticality!
At this point, I’ll admit that this isn’t exactly within an actual Game Boy’s technical power, but at this point, as long as I keep the monochrome palette, 16×16 pixel grid spacing, and keep up the “feeling” of a portable game, I might be able to rock this.
I’m also working on newer tree branches for the larger forest platforming, making sure they look natural while being modular enough to make as tall of a tree as the platform needs. The branches also need to have space for plenty of leaves to hide behind for gameplay purposes.
This Work in Progress is in BLK AQU4 Palette, just by personal choice to take a break from the green. These days, Adam prefers to work on test builds with color palette swaps to save on eyestrain. From these signs, We need to have a harder discussion about making the Blackmask in color.
Personally, I like the monochrome look. It looks unique to me without spending too much time on color choices. But, I do understand that the green look isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Coloring the game feels like an inevitability, but the real answer would be from feedback and how much faith the demo will grant to us.
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