ProjectDragonfly Update Dec2022 (Patreon)

Happy New Year!

Surprisingly, heaps of stuff got done this last month, despite the celebrations.

First off, I have another working title screen and character select screen.

Don't mind the temporary item sprites.

Spent a long time figuring out the UI animations, it's not something I've played around with much before but I'm starting to get the hang of it. I've also been playing around with the 3d here as you can see. I've considered the feedback on my previous post about the backgrounds being 2d or 3d. I think what I want to try is 3d backgrounds that look what I'd do with 2d backgrounds. That is to have mostly silhouettes and shapes dictate the environment and importantly restrict them to solid colours. This means I want to try avoiding the use of default 3d fog that you see in most 3d bgs. In this example I'm just interpolating the colours of the vertexes on the CPU side but if bgs are gonna get more complex I might try develop a custom fog shader that achieves this effect and see how it goes.

I made a few other small additions to the gameplay UI like a big ol' classic WARNING message before a boss and a stage entry message tho they need more polish.

Another big development is that I've scrapped the limited bullet palette and I'm now using a hue-shift shader to handle the bullet colours. This allows me to use ANY colour while only having to make one sprite for that bullet.

I did this mainly because I want the freedom of more colours even if I'll only use the sparingly, and having them take up less space on the texture is a nice little bonus.

I've also begun doing some small redesigns for the characters so that hopefully I can get some final portraits done which thankfully, due to no dialogue, I'll only have to do one MAYBE two.

I'm not limiting the palette but I do still want some visual themes so I'm gonna stick with using blue/purple as the base for all the character designs and also most of the visuals, with red being the main secondary colour. So with flytrap her original design was primarily green and red which stood out way too much because it didnt have any blue/purple base to keep it in line with the rest of the visuals. The same with roach, I want to keep the glowing green accents but the brown will probably become purple, though I haven't gotten to them yet. My goal with this is to keep an interesting visual identity for the game without locking myself out of opportunities that other colours might provide.

I still don't know exactly what I want to do for the starting character design but I suppose I should design that soon.

I think what I'll do next is work on more art assets since I'm in that kinda mood. I wanna try making a proper stage background as well and finalize all the elements of the gameplay UI. I don't know whether or not I'll actually get around to it but I've also FINALLY gotten some new headphones after way too long frankly, so possibly I'll try working on some music again. Chances are I'm super out of practice though so don't get your hopes up.