Progress Report 12/24/2021 (Patreon)

♫ Jingle Bells, Monday smells, Tuesday's just okay... Wednesday's bland and Thursday tried, but the best one is Fridaaaaay! ♫  Here's what I got done this week:

• Continued work on the concept art illustrations, including design decisions that surfaced from them
• Researched storyboarding for comics

I learned some pretty valuable stuff about storyboarding comics!... Okay, I can tell your eyes have already started drifting towards the first picture, so let's just jump to the good stuff: I did some drawing this week and had some decent success with it! However, I understand now the value that concept art has in the game industry. I always thought it was just for consistency and mood-setting for the artists; I never knew how many design decisions could be surfaced from it, and that's what we'll be covering over the next several images. Strap in!

I worked on backgrounds for both versions of the foot that we saw earlier in the month, starting with the foot that would slowly chase the player across the whole screen:

Alright, little dude added. So far so good! I also took the liberty of adding in some sidewalks. I could tell right off the bat that perspective was NOT going to work. First and foremost, it makes the foot look quite off. That's an easy fix, though. What's not an easy fix is getting the background to move towards the camera at an angle. I did this once with Grape Escape's ending sequence. NEVER AGAIN.

Ah, now this is shaping up to be quite nice! Making it vertically orthographic (vertical lines are all the same distance, and thus straight) seems to be consistent with the foot now -- it's as if the giantess is looking straight down.

I added buildings on the edges of the screen. There's still the issue of getting them to sorta skew as they move from the top of the screen to the bottom, but that's a much more manageable task.

Alright, so let's see how this looks with the other version of the foot -- the one that will walk quickly but only reaches the halfway point of the screen:

Hey, not bad! I'm loving the perspective on this! Unfortunately, while this would make for a wonderful drawing, I'd have some issues translating this into a game. Here's why:

1. The giantess is going to follow the player on the horizontal axis, otherwise the player could just walk on either side of the feet and be fine (since the feet don't chase the player in this version). That means not only adding roofs to the buildings, but also taking into account their horizontal position relative to the camera's in order to make the perspective look right. In layman's terms: the buildings are gonna look very wrong without extra work.

2. The play area is only about half the screen, and the player is quite small to boot. While these issues certainly aren't game-breaking, they may make the gameplay a little less enjoyable overall.

Additionally, do you notice that alleyway on the left side? I drew that with the intention of letting the player go through it, thus expanding the play area. However, that poses even more issues, like how does the giantess chase the player through the buildings? Does she walk through them and destroy everything in her path?

It was also here that I was toying around with the idea of making the giantess turn instead of strafing to follow the player's movements. In other words, the camera would rotate to follow the player depending on what side of the screen they're on, and the giantess's feet would remain in the center of the screen. This was how I originally envisioned the game to play, only there wouldn't have been any obstacles and the background would have just been grasslands.

With obstacles and cityscapes and whatnot, the game would border on 3D; I would need to draw multiple sprites for each obstacle to show off different angles, or just flat-out make 3D models of the obstacles in this 2D world. I'm... not prepared to do either of those things.

Okay, so the perspective looks good but the city environment doesn't quite work for it. Maybe something more open and flat could work. Something like...

A beach!

...

I'll be honest, I haven't explored this option very thoroughly. It's viable, though! Water on the left, a concrete barrier thingy on the right. (I'm not sure what they're called; the ramps that separate the beach from the city to catch tidal waves and whatnot.) Best of all, lots of space to run around!

The reason I pulled away from the beach idea is because I wanted to go back to the roots of the game idea, the one I mentioned a little bit ago:

The grasslands! Villages to be stomped, crowds of people running alongside you, rocks and lakes to hinder you. It's just as viable as the beach, really. The only issue is the houses -- they're a bit on the large side. I kinda had to make them that big since I wanted them to be in proportion to the player, and I didn't want to make the player even smaller.

With the houses at this size, it would be hard to simulate their destruction without making multiple sprites, one for each segment of the building that could be stomped (left side, right side, middle). Even if I did, they're still vertically larger than the foot. I could just take a good ol' "suspension of disbelief" pill and make them tiny little huts that are easy to stomp; after all, RPG Maker games have you treading the overworld as a giant, so it could work, right?

Let's see how this looks with the other foot version:

Hey, you know what? That's not bad! In fact, this may be even better than the city with this version! The fact that both environments work give this version... a leg up.

Oh, stop booing! You know you love it!

So, with both versions explored fairly thoroughly (I'm assuming the beach will work with both versions), I decided to try a third version -- an approach that combines the zoom of the camera with the perspective on the legs. Here's what I came up with:

It actually works pretty darn well! The foot now reaches up to about 85% of the way to the top of the screen, and I don't have to worry about the tops of the buildings or any of that nonsense. I could use the slow, chasing behavior of the original version's feet, but maybe give it a little more speed since the player has the top space to work with.

Right about here I was starting to worry that the city environment was doomed to be claustrophobic, until I had a brain wave that made me feel dumb and smart at the same time.

Just add extra lanes in the road, you dummy!

So, that solves that issue if I ever need to increase the play area in this example. I'm not fond of the double lines in the center, but that's just being nitpicky about something we won't have to worry about for a long time.

Concerning gameplay, that is still TBD; I've still gotta do some testing with you guys. As you know, these last few weeks at the cookie store have absolutely worn me out due to Christmas. This week was extra murdery. @_@  At long last, though, the holidays are reaching their end! That means work should be much easier for a good while, which means extra energy to actually build the game again! :D

On that note, It's Christmas Eve! Go out! Have fun! Spend time with family if you can and enjoy any and all holidays you celebrate! I'm... just gonna go take a nap. Taco Bell later.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. I'll see you guys again next week!