#indiegamedev

Been working on making sure guns feel great when being used. I’ve been referencing slow motion gifs of modern handguns firing, so much stuff going on. I have a lot more stuff I want to add to give that visceral feel of firing a gun. In pixel form!

Here’s some new art for a couple of playable characters for my cowboy game

Isolated versions of walking and jump. I figured its more fun showing this in game as opposed to just floating in a void. These gifs are at 30 FPS which is half of the frame rate of the game so it does drop some frames. I can’t post 60 fps gifs since they are massive. I’ll look into posting videos soon or posting links to webms or gyfcat.

Initially I wasn’t sure how to animate the walk and make it interesting enough. I have a unique situation where I can’t quite make a crazy cartoony walk because the guns positions are so crucial. I feel like this type of walk with the guns moving in and out of z space was an interesting compromise. I also really like the way I solved the scarfs movement. Another reason I animated it more generic is because I don’t think players will appreciate something so wacky that it distracts from the shooting gameplay. For this game i’m going to go with a more ‘cool’ style for animations.

I also like the way I animated the jump / apex / fall transitions. For now I’m leaving off animating loops for each jump / apex and fall transitions because it would be very hard to see anyway, so I’ll move on to more crucial animations.

This is running in engine but I’m in the process of replacing my placeholder graphics and animations. Since the player has to be cut up into top, arms and legs its a pain in the ass to just redo willy nilly. I have to plan it out. So for now here are my new animations placed on a dummy rig. Thanks to tumblr gif limit I have to break these up.

I’m gonna work on the color pass next week. I feel I’ve accomplished what I need with the monochrome pass. Plus I want to get the games visuals closer to final so I have a better idea of what I’m dealing with.

Spent more time on this than I thought was required but I couldn’t get some things working just the way I wanted. A lot of trial and error before I got to the finished product. 

This is basically the first animation I’ve finished using ASEPRITE. It’s come a long way but now I can finally switch from Graphics Gale.

Sooo I’ll break down my thought process for the animation step by step.

Version 1: I came up with an idea for how I wanted the idle to work. (I’m a big fan of energetic dancey style idle anims) I moved pieces around until I was satisfied with the general movement. At this stage it’s really messy but I can read it and get a feel for whether or not I can move on to version 2.

Version 2: I literally put another layer over my super rough animation and traced it so that it was more tied down(cleaner)

Version 3: More effort spent cleaning up the animation. The first thing I did at this stage was to fill in the colors bit by bit. I started at the shoes and worked my way up. I find that this is better than coloring a whole frame and then moving on. I think it’s better to work in layers.

Version 4: At this stage I had to go in and carefully hand pixel each little anti-alias pixel so that it matched the finished model. Also you’ll notice that the other version are flickering. This is because in version 4 I added more frames to smooth out the motion. The head, scarf, and gun were particularly difficult. The last bit of work I did on this piece was make the gun spin. I thought that was a nice touch.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun working on this. This animation will help set the standard for the rest of the games animations.

NOTE:The game is not going to be in monochrome. I’m focusing on the values so that players don’t get lost in the game field. I’m gonna work on the colors soonish.

I made my first post! Hoorah! Link is here 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/2894484

But it’s also here (below)

These are some fire marker concepts. I’m gonna pixel the top left and the middle shooting up one.(maybe all of them) I don’t know how I’ll use them in game but I’m going to pixel them anyway. I’m just gonna keep creating stuff then I’ll find a use for it later.

You want to keep playing, but you want to keep the main story for later.

Oracle of Forgotten Testament has several minigames you can play!

Can you guess what this one is?

Wishlist or try the demo here

https://store.steampowered.com/app/786510/Oracle_of_Forgotten_Testament/

P.S.: We’re also currently implementing the Chinese translation for an update near in the future! Share the news!