I've got the artwork for areas one, two, and three completed. Zooming out on the full map is pretty encouraging. I'm finding out just how tricky level design can be though. There are a lot of things to try to keep in mind as you build each room. Is the player getting lost too easily? Hopefully not, though that's something I'll have to determine mostly through watching someone else play. I have kept the critical path fairly linear. Whenever the path requires backtracking, I try to give the player another way to move through the rooms. Is there an architecture element that explains the shape of the room?  Sometimes, though I think I'm not the kind of player that stops to ask why this room exists in this world. I'm down for a police station that used to be an art museum that was run by an eccentric puzzle maker who liked funny-shaped keys.  I'd rather it be fun than make perfect sense.  I do try to avoid the more obvious issues, like "why is t...

I started off having the player as a white square as I was figuring out how to add abilities and change code around. It didn't take long though before I really wanted to draw up a player sprite with movement animations for some of the actions I was developing. The suit design always had the fishbowl helmet, but went through tons of little tweaks to the shape and colors, though I found out pretty quick that there isn't a whole lot of room when you commit to the player sprite being only 32x16 pixels. I settled on the pretty simple orange and blue with a grey and green blaster. It felt like if I tried to add anymore detail, it would just muddy up the look of the character. The walk cycle and other animations from player abilities were a lot of fun to draw. I've had a little experience with flash animation in the past, and there are a lot of good resources for pixel art animation. One of my favorite's is a video series by Dan Root called Video Game Animation...

   I started doing coding and Unity tutorials in January 2017, but ended up getting bogged down and lost motivation for a while. I had learned a lot of the basics for Unity and C#, but hadn't really started on making a game. Around May of 2018 I decided to get a game kit to jump start my interest/motivation. The Corgi Engine has been a great tool for learning how to code in Unity. Highly Recommend, good stuff.    I started by thinking up player abilities and the barriers that you would be able to clear once you got that ability. I also took some time to draw up the sprites and animations for the player character. By the end of the year, most of the abilities and barriers had been completed, as well as a game map complete with the layout of upgrades, obstacles, and bosses. I made up a demo level to test/tune each of the abilities and had friends play through it to see if it all worked and flowed smoothly.    Since the start of 2019, I...

Hello. I am making a game in Unity as a fun way to learn how to code a little. None of this is related to my real job. Just a fun hobby. The game is called Juno StarPlanet, and is a metroidvania style game not unlike the 150,000 or so that have been developed in the last decade. I have been using the Corgi Engine game kit as a starting template, and over the last several months have been designing levels and developing player abilities. This blog will just be a way for me to chart my progress as I go.