AZL GAME DEVLOG 07/16/2025
MORE SPRITES!!!
I kind of touched on this last time, but since this is a community for game development I feel the need to make sure it stays attached to these early posts - I know these are just animations right now, but I have set my focus on the creation of decent base character animations before I start working them into a Unity project. I promise though, we will be getting into the code once I have enough animations together to move around in the environment.
I’m thinking I’ll tackle all the side scrolling animations first, then the code to tie them together so I can move around. Then create something small, like two screens to walk around in. After that I assume will be a good time to start the sprite process again to get ready for the overworld map, followed similarly by a few adjacent overworld map screens. Finally, I will set up the overworld map so that entering a location on the map loads the previously devloped side scrolling environment. At that loint, the building blocks and tools will be at my disposal, and i will have fleshed out enough of the artistic and functional components that identifying the core personality and character interaction styles should feel less like a stab in the dark and more like a logical progression.
So side scroller sprite creation is where we are now, and here’s what I’ve added to the collection so far:
Note, I don’t plan on including nude characters in the game. These are base animations, and before I share the game beyond beta testing, I will have many many more animations, enabling outfit and weapon changes. All subsequent animations will just be layered on top of these, except Skullie…although Skullie was originally supposed to be a temporary/throw-away asset, he’s grown on me and now I think may even be the primary avatar for the game. Tough to say though, this early on.
Anyway, we’re going to focus on building up all the basics, then add in the special mechanics - and then certain design choices will be made based on the feel/character of the working prototype. I have a general framework in mind, but want to keep it open to changing if it doesn’t feel right - which, as if right now, its already actually changed a lot…more on that next time!
Sorry this one was short, I spent a lot of time setting up animations, and very little time thinking about how to talk about them. The game has actually begun taking shape, animations have been integrated with code, the start menus and first few game scenes have been crested, and the playerObject mechanics have been advanced pretty far along…allbeit, there are still some bugs to work out before I can show video of the gameplay
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I will try to keep a running list of all devlog entries here
Thanks for checking out some more of my work! As always, I hope you enjoyed witnessing as much as I enjoyed creating!
© Photos and words by @albuslucimus, except where otherwise indicated.
Looks badass so far!
Thanks brother, I appreciate that!
great to hear from you on your game. it will be cool to see some screen shots of your WIP in unity. ive never used unity, it would be cool if you shared some of your workflow from it, how it works and what you have working, when you do :)
that's definitely next. the tough part is, I've never used Unity either, so I'm learning as I go, which makes talking about it that much harder. I'm a ways in to the code now though, so I'm getting more comfortable and actually started a post this morning about what that's been like. Unity is powerful, but the learning curve has been very difficult for me. The more I work in it though, the more I begin to develop an intuition for how to do things. Here is a shot from my next post (it may be a while since I'm mostly focused on getting the basics to work right still)
The physics aspect is a lot to tackle. Right now I've got issues getting the playerObject to jump, and with weird relationships between player and environment. I believe that is due to scaling the original work up by 72% to fit the window ratio, but apparently in Unity you're using "world units," which means like 100 pixels per unit, so a distance of 5 units would be the equivalent of 500 pixels. So when I scaled up to get the right proportions, at first I thought I coulnd't move, but it turned out it just was really slow. I had a walk speed of 3 (i assume that's units per second, or 300 pixels), so in a scene that's almost 2000 pixels in width, it was a crawl. I haven't gone back and fixed the rest of the physics yet, just got my in scene teleport doors working and am ready now to move back to physics. I'll probably be a ghost while I'm getting this nailed down, it's been a messy start. In the gif above, the playerObject apparently collides with the ramp, has some sort of elastic collision, and flies away lol - Once the character and environment physics settings are good, I suspect this process will be a little smoother.