tokufan400:

Okay, I need to vent/rant about something for a bit

Who here, be they my followers or just some one browsing my page, knows about or has at least heard of Indivisible? If you have not, I don’t blame you since it’s not a game that drawn in a lot of attention (at least from what I’ve seen). To give a quick plot summary, Indivisible tells the story of Ajna as she journeys around her world recruiting allies in her fight to avenge her father after he was killed in an attack on her village by the warlord Ravannavar. Some of these allies include:Dhar, the one who led the attack under the belief it was for the greater good, only to see how evil Ravannavar is and become a fully willing ally (on his part at least). Razmi, a gloomy shamaness who joins the team after her home was destroyed by Ravannavar’stropes.Ginseng and Honey, an aspiring botanist and thier Mandragora who want to look for exciting plants all over the world. And Thorani, a Deva (species) who found, healed, adopted, and joined Ajna’s party after a turning point in the story. Their are a lot more party members, so this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are also characters who are completely optional or are there two serve other purposes that are not battle related. How do they all travel? By letting Ajna absorb them into her head.

Indivisible is an RPG/Metroidvania platformer. In the overworld, you use different abilities that you gain through out the story to traverse the world. As expected of a Metroiedvania, you are expected to use these abilities to explore parts of the world that you could not at first. The RPG element comes in the form of battle (of course). In battle , you take control of four charterers, with Ajna being the one you have in the party at all times. The battles work by assigning each character with a button to preform an attack, and each character has their own way of working. When you know what your doing, you can pull of some damaging combos. You can also use items called Ringsels that you find in the world to increase defense and how many buttons you can use to attack. Overall. it’s a fine game, especially for any one who is a fan of fighting games and Metroidvanias.

Now, why am I talking about this? Well, the game was made by the now defunct Lab Zero, who is famous for the Skullgirls series. Originally, this game was going to get so much more. A New Game Plus, Challenges, and best of all, guest Characters. Some of these guest included Shantae,JuanfromGuacamelle,RedfromTransistor,AnniefromSkullgirls, and Shovel Knight. Now, why have we not gotten this content? Same reason that Lab Zero went under. Mike Z.Mike Z (Mike Zaimont) was the lead design director at Lab Zero. In June 2020, multiple allegations were made against Mike such as verbal sexual harassment. When the Lab Zero board requested for Mike to step down, he refused and disbanded the board, making himself the sole owner of Lab Zero. This was the last straw as multiple employees of Lab Zero left and partner developers cut all ties with the company. WhileSkullgirls was safe and is still being worked on by 505 Games, any other plans from Lab Zero was stopped completely, and this included Indivisibleupdates.

So, after one last update that added New Game Plus and Razmi’s Challenges, any and all plans for Indivisible are all but dead. This is complete bullshit. Thanks to one man, this game, a game that was funded by fans on Kickstart mind you, was killed off. How is that fair? Is Indivisible a perfect game? Hell no, but it deserved better damn it. Think about it: We could have had ShantaeandShovel Knight, two well beloved Indie characters, playable in an RPG, pulling off attacks, combos, and super moves that are love letters to their home games with other Indie characters. But no, one scum of the earth human begin ruined all of that.

So please, if what I said has peeked any interest, seek this game out. It’s on Playstation 4, Xbox One, Linux, MacOS, Microsoft Windows, and Nintedo Switch. It is a game that should be recognized. Show the people who worked at Lab Zero (except Mike cause crew him) that their work was worth it, because this game did not deserve it’s fate. To any Lab Zero employee who happens to see this, thank you for making this game.

And to you Mike Z, Fuck You. Fuck everything you stand for you piece of shit. With any luck, you will never work in the Video Game world again, and the industry as a whole will be all the better for it.

Thank you for reading, and let me know if got anything wrong.

It’s December 10th, and any of my followers who are as big on Shovel Knight as I am knows what that means— it’s Shovel Knight: King of Cards’ second anniversary! My post for the campaign’s first anniversary just last year featured a triad of wallpapers perfectly suited to King Knight’s grandeur, but looking back at them I noticed something…

For the anniversaries of the previousthreecampaigns, I made wallpapers featuring a checkerboard-styled pattern featuring select sprites of each respective campaign’s protagonist, as well as campaign-exclusive characters overlayed onto two colors I feel best fit each adventure.

Though, for some reason, I didn’t end up making one for King Knight’s campaign last year, even though I had gone and made one for Plague Knight’s a few months prior. I think it was simply because I already had three detail-intensive wallpapers, plus I could experiment with it more once Specter of Torment’s anniversary rolled around.

Though, with King of Cards’ anniversary upon us…

The gilded goon now has a checkerboard wallpaper of his own! It was admittedly a little tough settling on a pair of colors that not only I liked, but also looked good (A nice shade of yellow was always in the cards)… but I quite like the end result and showcases a lot of my favorite frames of King Knight’s animations!

May this pretend monarch reign for another year!

I beat Plague Knight without taking a hit without using the Phase Locketinthirteen seconds.

Last year, I unveiled an accomplishment that I was particularly proud of at the time: a perfect run of Plague Knight’s boss battle from Shovel of Hope without resorting to the Phase Locket. Not only did this feat kickstart other perfect runs I’d eventually go on to pull off, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the practice that went into it.

In said post, I make a passing mention about how it took me anywhere between two to three hours to finally nail a damageless run against Plague Knight, to the point where I had memorized his attack patterns and what phase of the fight came when. And, to its credit, it’s still a pretty solid performance!

But anyone who knows me knows that my perfectionism knows no bounds. Now that I knew that I was capable of perfect running one of the most unpredictable bosses in the game, I began to wonder: could I beat Plague Knight without taking damage faster than my original time of thirty-five seconds?

Well, if the above video is any indication, than yes! It took oodles of practice to get a run a swift as this one and have the whole run fit into the Nintendo Switch’s thirty second limit video capture— at one point I had a pretty good fifteen second run completed, but with the way I recorded it, it was missing a few frames in-battle and wouldn’t have looked good edited together.

This didn’t deter me, however, and it was with recently-acquired skill and a pinch of luck that I was able to pull this off. I am S U P E R proud of this and hope that it amazes you as much as it amazed me!

Ifone of my first few art posts on this blog is any indication, I love making sprite art. While I didn’t necessarily consider myself much of a sprite artist back when I first joined tumblr in April of last year, the progress I’ve made in improving upon what I could do with pixels since is considerable.

Up until very recently, however, most if not all of my sprite pieces were done in an 8-Bit visual style, seeing as NES-Styled sprites are the easiest for me to make— there’s just something so fun about working with limitations and seeing how few colors one could use to make a visually stunning sprite.

With this, the thought of attempting something in a 16-Bit visual style didn’t cross my mind for quite some time. I was convinced for a bit (Pun absolutely intended) that my skill in sprite art was limited to a faux NES visual style, though with the unveiling of Override a little bit ago, it was pretty clear to me that my skillset exceeded eight mere bits.

And to see if it really did, I wanted to challenge myself with a task: sprite something that looks like it’d fit right in with Mega Man 7 on the SNES, cartoony yet solid visual flair and all. At first, I wasn’t sure what I could attempt making a 16-Bit sprite of…

But a fellow practitioner of shovelry was all I needed for inspiration!

With a franchise like Shovel Knight bearing an iconic faux NES visual style, it was only a matter of time before fans began to wonder what the titular spade-spinner would look like with a double the bits, and because of this, quite a few SNES-esque iterations of Shovel Knight and company are out there.

My goal, however, wasn’t to create the definitive 16-Bit styled Shovel Knight. As I mentioned, I wanted to really take into consideration how Mega Man 7’s sprites looked in particular (I.E. size, colors, shading styles, etc.) and reference Shovel Knight’s original sprite to ultimately concoct an upgraded, SNES-ified Shovel Knight.

Keeping these limitations in check, I managed to draw a sprite of the blue burrower using only eleven colors in contrast to Mega Man’s twelve— a whole color less! At one point in the sprite’s creation, I used twelve colors, though swapped out a dark grey for a dark blue. It isn’t very often in my sprite posts that I provide a step-by-step process on how I go about spriting, though for this post…

I’ve made a gif of the process using the various pieces I had on my workspace! You’ll notice a few things change as the sprite is shaped, the most obvious to me are his legs, which go from a solid placeholder color to fully shaded and then fixed a bit in the span of a few frames.

My end result really does prove that I can sprite whatever I can set my mind to, doesn’t it? I was NOT expecting the turnout to look so clean and faithful to the style I was going for, and it was really fun making it! Perhaps in the future, I could try my hand at a 16-Bit King Knight, or even SNES-ifying some of my Mega Man robot master OCs! Until that happens, though, I hope you’ve enjoyed my deep dive into the creation of what Shovel Knight may have looked like in the mid-90s!