Hey folks! Ryan the Art Guy here with new progress reports of Blackmask for the past months. Blackmask is trudging along despite little to talk about beyond art updates and my weekly streams. I work on left-over sprites in my asset list, and Adam gets enemy behavior and projectiles working.
Despite our time occupied by larger life responsibilities, our two-man team keeps it going! If we can keep our steady pace, this year may be our year to have a presentable and playable demo ready to tackle a kickstarter campaign and hit the ground running.
Thorn Club Weapon
Cole’s knocking ’em out the park with the Thorn Club. Compared to his dinkier daggers, this carved tree stump wrapped in thorns can pack a whallop!
The standing attack can hammer down objects and bat away enemies trying to jump on Cole.
The crouching attack can cat forward enemies with a heavy swing and send them flying forward. With precise focus, Cole could even bat back flying rocks, cannonballs, and other big projectiles!
Cole can swing in the air with similar qualities to his crouching swing, with more ability to move in the air.
Bear Enemy Sprite
After months of painstaking polish, I got as much as I can do on the last touches on the Bear Clubber Animation. The last few months of the work is creating damage and knockout animations to fell the big lug. It’s been decent progress during my many artstreams on Twitch where I also show clips of what Adam sends my way
As far as I know, this is the largest sprite I’ve ever worked on! This sucker could not fit in a real cartridge as I haven’t adhered to the limits of the Game Boy hardware, due to this game being programmed in Unity. Thinking about if I did need to adhere to these tech limits, would I be able to find a creative solution to fit it in a cart? Maybe that’s a question for a separate project.
All this work is will be worth the reduction in headaches. I plan to reuse the sprites and swap heads for newer enemy types like bulls. This heavy sprite work hinges on this enemy type being fun to be challenge by. So I’m eager to get these mechanics tested and learning about the real game!
Bug Busting and More Work
Adam’s busy with his day job, and he smooths out bugs on weekends and other moments of his spare time when he checks in with me. He’s been smoothing out the bugs with the Enemy Behavior and Pathfinding, with issues such as different weapons getting attached to each other and making a ruckus.
According to him, we’re far enough along that there’s little left to do but graphical polishing. Menus, UI, the various belts and whistles to help wrap this demo in a presentable package.
The Future
These latest character sprites may be the last weapon I tackle animating for now, to focus on other art related needs. I’m taking some deeper dives into Unity’s Tilemap and Sprite Editor systems to check through for rougher visual problems.
I’ll admit that I procrastinate on backgrounds and non-character artwork, but I’m picking up new knowledge for my workflow making these environment assets.
These sprites and Blackmask in general has me burning out and losing focus on the big picture of the game. The tiny details of my art needs occupies my mind and I can’t step away from it even when I go to my day job or a side project.