concept art and sleeping (shutter - devlog 1)
concept arting
heya! so shutter has been on my mind still recently but not a lot of progress has been made, but I thought I would share some concept art for the game that I have been working on to illustrate how the game will work. moving all my stuff home for the summer and readjusting will probably take some time, however i would like to keep my posts consistent with whatever may have happened in the time between. keep in mind, anything i show is not final and subject to change, yo!
this was my initial concept art i created immediately after settling on the idea. as you can see, i continue to go with my favourite palette of all time, EDG32, i feel its vibrancy is unmatched. also entirely created in aseprite, my current favourite art software like overall. a pleasure to use! and like, its red is my favourite red of all time i just love it.
i feel this illustrates the general idea of the feel i want to go for. top right ui has the ability to view your inventory of sorts, that keeps a log of every bird you have managed to capture and also any other info that i may need to store. i want it to be presented in a journal sort of style with pages and flicking, and the pictures will also be shown in a polaroid format. to the left of that icon is a battery. i want some sort of mechanic to add to the gameplay loop to require the player to backtrack and return to the places they have already been, and i feel as if some sort of camera storage/battery system would help to achieve this allowing them to offload images/recharge back at some sort of central hub and chat to other people about their adventures, complete questlines perhaps. i want the world to be ever changing, and a way to encourage the player to see this.
the other side
ive got a github repo setup and am already beginning to learn the ins and outs of love2d, and gathering the libraries necessary to complete the project. i have also started to learn tiled, that allows me to build maps and export them directly into a lua file for importing into my project via sti (simple tiled implementation). i had visions of having to build maps entirely out of arrays and while yeah thats how they do end up, tiled is such a tool i would have never imagined to exist if that even makes sense. im always fascinated by the simplest of solutions!!
other than that, i have some sort of 4 direction movement going on, displaying graphics from my tiled data. theres also a working camera, but that needs some work later on to be more smooth and useful for the player. it currently keeps the player in the middle of the screen all the time which isnt great for game feel.
next time on ace...
i hope to have setup collisions at this point, walls are nice for not running through buildings but i also need to setup a way of interacting with the world. the player needs to be able to enter doors, take photos and actually be able to detect when theres a bird in range and so on. i essentially just need to get the basic workings of a playable prototype to work so i can begin testing and see what works. perhaps even share it! who knows. but yeah, email for any suggestions or additions and have a great week :3