Hey everyone, Ryan the Art guy here with an update on the progress of Blackmask! The pair of us keep moving along with new progress, and we’re at a point of marking down harder deadlines to shoot for later in the year! Nothing will be mentioned publicly, but there’s a new focus on pushing what we have out there to get hands-on player feedback as soon as possible!
Continued Work on Backgrounds
These days, I’ve been working on environment assets for the Owlbear Ruins Cole will be exploring. I’m more of a character person, but creating storytelling backgrounds is an ongoing challenge. Doing these backgrounds pushes my knowledge of value and contrast to utilizes 4-Color Limit for the art direction.
At the moment, I have a good general-purpose temple background with seamless horizontal and vertical loops. This’ll be fine set dressing while Adam, the Code guy, tests out the level and enemy placement with rough greybox layouts.
This taste of how it looks through Aseprite’s Tiled Mode is pushing Blackmask closer to a real video game! Soon, more set-piece backgrounds will be made to vary the locations!
More Character Sprites
In my spare time, I’m working on new character animations for enemies and NPCs to have more to do on my personal Twitch channel!Adam still has so much level layout and enemy AI work that needs to be done that I’m not swamping him new stuff until the old is figure out.
This Bear Enemy is an enemy I’ve been interested in seeing if it’s possible to have larger characters in the game. I want Blackmask to be full of animal characters large and small interacting with each other and having the gameplay inform those interactions. It’s ambitious, but I’m hoping a character like this can even be done for regular game interactions.
The two types of animations is me figuring out a direction for the animation style. The left one has more limited animation and goes more to the 8-bit animation limits. But, the right one has smoother animations, which look better for a larger character taking up the screen. I’m already beyond the actual Game Boy hardware’s capabilities by developing in Unity Engine, I’m going for the right.
Livestreaming
I can say that I’ve been livestreaming on my personal Twitch channel, where I’ve been working weekly on new pixel assets such as new animations and background work.
A majority of the streams will be developing Blackmask. If you miss these streams, I’ll be posting a lightly edited Full Stream Archives on YouTube! Clips that are relevant for Blackmask proper will be posted on the main Blackmask YouTube Channel as soon as I can!
Blackmask Manual
As I’m working on all my pixel tasks, I’m cultivating a draft of a game manual that will be both online and offline.
The online manual will be a series of web pages to flesh out what the gameplay is, who the characters are, and add details to the lore of the world Cole inhabits.
Retro style manuals are always a cool addition to these games, and it’s a creative task that I can do during my off times away from my computer.
Scouting Events
As we work more to the beginning of a playable demo, I’ve been scouting around for events to show it off! At one of the many convention events I sell my art, I keep a small screen showing a video of Cole in action!
With it, I have a 5×7 promo stand for Blackmask with Left and Right QR Codes to go to this Website and Mailing List respectively!
We’re always on the lookout for events in our area to show off a hands-on setup of Blackmask! With our workflows maturing and getting better acquainted with the game design, it’s possible that we can have a demo ready within the year. Thanks for keeping up with us and I hope to have bigger news in the coming future!
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