The Friendly Necromancer: Devlog[0] Road to Demo

World building... Everyone has their ups and downs with this. I have had to design and redesign my world and focus on the flow of the game play. I have added onto tilesets to add additional details, mainly the farm fields, I believe they added a little more to the game and made the world less empty. What you see in the screen shots is the first initial world layout followed by the updated layout to include new tiles. Right now my aim is to create more assets, like houses for the little villages in the first biome as pictured. There will be a total of 4 biomes in the game and an additional city in the middle of the map. I decided to go with an open world for my game to make it feel more alive. 

I created the first enemy you encounter, the Blood Mage, nasty things. I have started on the first boss to defeat and have successfully added mechanics so that it's sprite changes depending on where the player is located. The things that still need to be added is the attack moves and of course the sprite and animations itself. I have started on the general look of the boss itself as pictured above. The idea is to have the boss in a pool of blood hence why he's a little cut off.

The protagonist and your first friend has already been completed, however, I would like to touch up the main characters sprite as she is looking a little flat. I have been focusing on pixel art tutorials to nail the shading and I want to add more then 2 frames of movement on the main character to make her feel a little less choppy. My background on my personal art has always been realism with pencil and paper so dealing with pixel art and cartoony styles has been a challenge. I don't like to use hard outlines on my characters as I want to blend them more into the world.

My next goal after nailing down the boss mechanics is to add NPC's into the world and interactable NPC's to initiate questlines. I initially didn't plan for quests in my game but I believe they would add a little extra emersion in the world and offer some lore. This brings me to my next challenge, the lore of this world. I always new initially that there would be 4 bosses with a final boss at the end, with adding the quest lines it gives me an opportunity to add into the story of the game. What that story looks like is still to be worked on, however I do have an idea for the ending of the game, this is under tight wraps, spoilers.

This brings me to the demo version of the game. I would like to have this first biome completely open to play test and try the demo in. My goal for the demo is to have this first area as polished as possible so it gives a good indication of gameplay. Itch has been always my primary go to for games and holds a special place in my heart, however, I would like to make this game my first commercial game. I will be adding the demo to both Itch and Steam in order to broaden the feedback needed. The demo of course will be free to play and the pricing of the final game is still to be determined.

I hope to continue with these devlogs and offer weekly updates on what's going on with the game. My ambition is to have a devlog come out every Saturday to give and update. My next devlog will include a video of some of the gameplay and an outline of my processes. As always even with these devlogs feedback is important, if there's anything you would like me to touch on or ideas to add I want to hear them!

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming, see you next Saturday!