I'm spending most of my time working on making a video game called Scythe Machine and plan to post updates and gifs here along with other photos and drawings.
I also post updates on my reddit account, as well as a few updates + photos + drawings on my instagram.
If you'd like to get in touch, shoot an email to joshua@drubin.io
Back to the Devlog with a Character Rework
Well it has been just over a year since I stopped making actual
posts. I fell off after just three entries, a new record. Well now I'm
back. I was finding it much easier to just post stories on
Instagram, but it feels too ephemeral now. I'd like to just have it
all in one place. I have been regularly working on Scythe Machine,
but since I don't have it in me to fill in a year's worth of
updates, I'll just mention the most recent one.
I just reworked the green fellas because they were the first enemy I
made over 2 years ago and the animations / control-scheme was out of
date. Below is part of the new sprite sheet that I generated after
exporting the 3d animations from Blender as a sequence of images
which then get put together in Aseprite to make the actual sheet.
Then I pull that sprite sheet into Unity where it gets sliced up
with every frame receiving a label of some sort. Afterwards, I
personally use code to control the characters’ animations every
frame because the built-in animation tooling in Unity is kinda wack.
The first gif at the beginning of this post shows the green fellas
and their new animations / movement stuff. Excuse my poor aim in the
clip,, I’m working on it 😵💫
Import New Artwork in B&W
Today I messed with some of the lines from the new artwork and
pulled it into the game to see how it looked. I haven't colored
anything yet, I wanted to see what it would look like in black and
white. While it does seem like it could possibly be worth exploring,
it feels a bit more like a story book than a game, which isn't
exactly what I'm going for. I think I'll spend some more time
today/tomorrow adding color in a way that will let me change it in
the game at runtime. Given that there will only be a few colors, my
plan is to color in the artwork in photoshop in greyscale, and then
write a shader in Unity that will map those greyscale color values
to some color parameters that I can specify either in code or via
the Unity UI.
Giant Re-work and Rig
I got some sick environment artwork done by Jackson at Snail
Farm so I reworked the Giant character to match the artwork. The
character has a weapon now, which I was hesitant to do at first
because it complicates everything; the rigging, animating, in-game
logic and effects are all harder to setup and deal with. But I do
think it'll probably lead to a more interesting boss fight with more
ways to create different kinds of attacks/obstacles. I just finished
rigging the character with different weapon slots in Blender (i.e. I
now have different ways of controlling the weapon/limbs of the
character when animating) so I can finally get to the actual
animations. For now, I'm going to just start off with getting the
giant to stand up and walk around. Once that's in place, I plan on
spending time to work with the artwork to try and figure out the
best way to include it in the game. The first thing I'll try is to
hand-paint a normal map on top of the artwork, bring it into the
game, and get the lighting / colors to look good.
Giant Attack Animation
Started working on the giant's first attack animation. At first the
thought was that he should dive the player(s) and cause a shockwave,
so I animated that. Then I realized I had to animate the giant
getting up and going back to idle somehow, but thought it felt kind
of boring. So I ended the dive with the giant going into a headstand
ready to start spinning into his next attack like a damn Beyblade.
Let it rip baby.
here are some of my photos
• 📷 minolta x700
• 📷 sony a7iii
todo
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