Devlog - 7

No better way to spend these dark cold days than getting lost in development of Beast Planet. This past week I've mostly been focused on environment/tile design. As you can see from the first couple images, we are going with a 3/4 top down view, similar to the style used in my Phantasy Star study. This is the common presentation of many 16bit RPGs. The consistent perspective provides a convincing sense of depth, however the way the viewpoint hides the back side of elevated areas and objects is a caveat one must consider with the layout of environments.

The first image is the start of Omega Colony, which is going to be the hub city of the game. This will likely be the only major town in the game, so I want to make it relatively large, and rich with content for the sake of world building. I break things into tiles anywhere I can take advantage of the repetition, but many features and buildings will be unique large assets, all paying mind to a 16x16px tile map. I great deal of thought has gone into the design of the city. I'll share more details about the concept creation in a future post.

Also, getting a planet based environment concept going. Planning to use elevation to add interest, but not sure if we'll have full on platforming. Surely want to include climbing and other environmental choke points that require you to get out of your mech, or use a special skill to advance.

I also further refined the player sprite, added some more animations and organized all frames into an atlas. I use Texture Packer to organize and create the atlases. Currently, we can do all basic movement/running, shooting while running or idle, and climbing. Still raw assets at the moment, but we'll put him into action in game soon!

More coming next week!