Tag Archives: Art

Shadows and Gradients

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Again, I have produced a small demo of the Tengu Engine as my own way of experimenting with what may be possible as it progresses along its development path.  While work is already under way on the hardware renderer, it still has not been integrated into the main code so this demo here still uses SDL for all of the rendering. What it shows is a top down perspective using a destroyed space ship tile set I made recently.  There are ray traced shadows as well as what I refer to as gradients, or distance based mask pattern selection, to give the illusion of light or visibility falloff, which is a technique somewhat similar to dithering I suppose.

Laying Out The Plan

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I have been working on some tiles for this project today to help me define a more solid overall look of the game.  The task for today will be to update the engine to support custom maps and these nice tiles.  The water rendering is also coming along so I am hoping I can have these things integrated by tomorrow.

Also, something that I have rarely seen in a platform game is genuine AI companions that can join the player on their journey.  I guess this is in part due to the fact that it can be hard to create an AI that can navigate and jump between platforms properly, however I have devised what could be a great solution to this problem.

Art and animation practice

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I have not just been working on Ninja Flare since the submission deadline of LD#26 however. I have been experimenting with lots of pixel art for game ideas I have had.

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Since my childhood have always loved the god games from Bullfrog, such at theme park and dungeon keeper. I have always wanted to make a god/simulation game involving a small group of people trying to gather resources to survive the natural elements. I made a mockup of what a game of this sort may look like visually. The little people could collect food by hunting and fishing, as well as collecting lumber for fires and for making cabins to shelter from the cold.

An alternative in the same vein as the above game is shown below.

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The game would take place on a small island, far out at sea. A man and his wife, live out there days in a small cabin on top of this island. It would be more of an interactive simulation then a game in my mind. Just something nice to look at. There would be a day and night cycle, rain, snow and sunshine. The plants and flowers could come into bloom and then die off. The man and his wife would collect resources and use them to survive, again fishing, collecting wood, rocks etc to maintain themselves and their cabin. The art style shown is not really what I was aiming for so I will still be playing around with this idea a lot.

There was a great entry into this LD#26 Game Jam that really resonated with me. It is called potato dungeon. The art and setting are just great and really inspired me to knock up a pixel style demake of it.

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The characters here are just great fun to animate. The dragon is my own design, but the horse, knight and pig are very true to the art of the original. I would love to program a mockup of this one day.