It is incredible how much has happened in the past few months. I now realise that I probably should have written a whole post about each section. I will give you a brief review of things that have changed since December. We welcomed a new concept artist. We finished editing all music for the demo. We finished all remaining cutscenes. We started prepping our Kickstarter page and negotiating some epic physical rewards. And just about a week or so ago we decided to change our entire in-game animation system.
Welcome MAM!
Unfortunately, towards the end of last year we had to look for a new concept artist. While this definitely put things on hold with the project for some time, we're right back on track and boy, have we got some great new characters too!
So without further ado, I would like to introduce to you the artist behind our new characters: Marton Adam Marton.
We did approach Adam a few years ago to join our project as concept artist, but at the time he was working for a company so he had to decline our offer. But recently he started freelancing, and was happy to draw us some really cool stuff! The fun bit in this story is that he has some internet fame in Hungary as he is the creator of "Hungarian Folktales Star Wars". It is a collection of fanart in which he depicts key moments of the Star Wars movies in the style of Hungarian Folktales (a cartoon series from the 70s that influenced our kooky art style).
Hand of fate, or what? :D
So without further ado, I would like to introduce to you the artist behind our new characters: Marton Adam Marton.
We did approach Adam a few years ago to join our project as concept artist, but at the time he was working for a company so he had to decline our offer. But recently he started freelancing, and was happy to draw us some really cool stuff! The fun bit in this story is that he has some internet fame in Hungary as he is the creator of "Hungarian Folktales Star Wars". It is a collection of fanart in which he depicts key moments of the Star Wars movies in the style of Hungarian Folktales (a cartoon series from the 70s that influenced our kooky art style).
Hand of fate, or what? :D
Check out more of his work on ArtStation!
9 out of 10 outlaws prefer this tune
It is our absolute pleasure to announce that our demo will be featuring the music of Kerekes Band!
The distinctive sound of Kerekes Band is an irresistible groove of tumbling bass-lines, driving drums and wildly spiraling flute riffs. Traditional Hungarian instruments and songs, flawlessly combined with modern genres such as rock, funk, jazz and dance. And it sounds amazing. :)
Having their work in the game really completes the atmosphere that we are aiming for: genuine folk with a modern twist.
In our demo during gameplay and in cutscenes you will hear some of their songs, for example this one.
The distinctive sound of Kerekes Band is an irresistible groove of tumbling bass-lines, driving drums and wildly spiraling flute riffs. Traditional Hungarian instruments and songs, flawlessly combined with modern genres such as rock, funk, jazz and dance. And it sounds amazing. :)
Having their work in the game really completes the atmosphere that we are aiming for: genuine folk with a modern twist.
In our demo during gameplay and in cutscenes you will hear some of their songs, for example this one.
CUT!!!
All cutscenes are now finished! Unfortunately I can't share much about them without spoiling the puzzles. You wouldn't want that, would you?
Kickstarter prep
We have been hard at work setting up Kickstarter stuff!
We have been brainstorming about cool physical rewards for a good while, but now that we actually started to negotiate details of producing them, it suddenly feels all... real.
As we haven't decided on anything yet, I won't be sharing any details of the rewards just yet, but rest assured they will all be very cool! :D
We have been brainstorming about cool physical rewards for a good while, but now that we actually started to negotiate details of producing them, it suddenly feels all... real.
As we haven't decided on anything yet, I won't be sharing any details of the rewards just yet, but rest assured they will all be very cool! :D
What could possibly Go Wrong?
Years ago we made the decision to use spritesheets for our in-game animations. When we made the original for the game jam it was a no brainer. We only had about 8 or 16 frames max for each animation so we didn't really need anything more complicated than spriesheets.
When we started making it into a "real" game, we were using OpenToonz and upped the animation fps to 30. We were really happy with the results at the time. Then we switched to 60 fps and there came trouble...
The first setback we experienced was that Unity could only handle 8k textures, which meant that if we had 512x512 sized characters, we could only fit 256 frames into one spritesheet. At 60 fps, that is roughly 4 seconds. For most animations this was acceptable, but we had to split a few of them in half.
The next issue we faced was the sheer size of the textures. When we reached a certain number of spritesheets they became impossible to handle. The Unity resource files could not be bigger than 4GB at the time (it has changed since for 64bit platforms). We exceeded that limit and had to find a workaround. But even so, our sprites took up a ridiculous amount of space and we started running out of memory when we were trying to make a build, or quite simply just ran out of disk space. We had to do something about this.
Last week we decided to switch all our existing animations to use Spine.
Spine is a 2D skeletal animation tool which comes with a number of ready-made components for various game engines, including Unity.
We have spent a good week on writing a tool to import some of the old animations into the new system.
Look!
When we started making it into a "real" game, we were using OpenToonz and upped the animation fps to 30. We were really happy with the results at the time. Then we switched to 60 fps and there came trouble...
The first setback we experienced was that Unity could only handle 8k textures, which meant that if we had 512x512 sized characters, we could only fit 256 frames into one spritesheet. At 60 fps, that is roughly 4 seconds. For most animations this was acceptable, but we had to split a few of them in half.
The next issue we faced was the sheer size of the textures. When we reached a certain number of spritesheets they became impossible to handle. The Unity resource files could not be bigger than 4GB at the time (it has changed since for 64bit platforms). We exceeded that limit and had to find a workaround. But even so, our sprites took up a ridiculous amount of space and we started running out of memory when we were trying to make a build, or quite simply just ran out of disk space. We had to do something about this.
Last week we decided to switch all our existing animations to use Spine.
Spine is a 2D skeletal animation tool which comes with a number of ready-made components for various game engines, including Unity.
We have spent a good week on writing a tool to import some of the old animations into the new system.
Look!
It's all fixed now, don't worry! :) Some bits will still have to be adjusted manually, but we are saving a lot of time with this tool.
With switching to skeletal animations we are reducing build size and memory usage. On top of that we can look into implementing a lot of cool features that we not possible with spritesheets: inverse kinematics, skinning, layering animations, lipsync and many more.
With switching to skeletal animations we are reducing build size and memory usage. On top of that we can look into implementing a lot of cool features that we not possible with spritesheets: inverse kinematics, skinning, layering animations, lipsync and many more.
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