Bytebeasts: November 2023 DevBlog (Part One)

Progress since last DevBlog

Sorry for the long delay, and thanks to everyone for their patience looking forward to reading the next DevBlog. There have been a few life changes and delays, but I've made a LOT of changes since the last time people had a chance to test my prototype. I've worked on a lot of sprites, animations, UI, and code to begin development of the world.

Work Completed So Far...

Combat looks more lively than ever! Every monster I have designed now has a battle animation for more expression during combat. This took me until mid-May before I started researching pixel art for tilesets to begin creating the world.

The first thing I wanted to design was the first zone the player would venture. Most of my research was from referencing Pokemon Firered/Ruby since I think Pokemon from GBA series was remarkable for its time and still stands out even today. I learned that the tilesets from Pokemon are actually smaller than their character sprites. Usually character sprites matches the tileset dimensions for grid-based movement, but Pokemon creates a block of 2 by 2 tiles for grid-based movement. Meaning if a character sprite is 32 by 32 pixels, a tileset is 16 by 16. This creates more flexibility with designing the world, but it also means longer tile designs beforehand. Overall, I'm really proud of how things looked when I recreated one of the prototype scenes.

Old prototype scene

Prototype scene redesigned + other pixel art concepts

Early display of my newly developed pixel art skills for the world!

The circuitry lines from the concept video doesn't give it justice for the prototype itself. It took SEVERAL attempts to get that right. I have to thank the MegaMan Battle Network Series for showing me a few good examples of creating "live" circuitry through tiles.

 

After I felt confident with tiles I started creating the menu UI. I am not ever usually excited for UI design since it requires a lot of planning and work. And even still, the first few attempts may not work as intended.

First draft of  a long process...

Another early design, but I was proud of the screen fade!

Around mid-June I switched from menu UI implementation to creating battle transitions. I also learned around this time period that Pokemon has several battle transitions that are dependent on your leading monster's level compared to the enemy level, if it's inside a dungeon or not, and if it's a wild battle or trainer battle. I was inspired to create several myself.

Which battle transition do you like more?

Up until October, I worked on completing the basic menu systems that I wanted to have working. As I worked towards completing the Bytebeast submenus, I needed to implement other features I didn't create yet. This was traits, renaming, allocating bonus stats, and switching. Bytebeasts can now be diverse between each other despite being the same species. 

Once I had the menu system working, I went back to creating more of the world. This included buildings, various overworld objects, and battle background images for the first area. I was a little intimidated to do a environment background because I thought I have to include a lot of small details. Thankfully, I figured out that simple, even for environmental art, can show cool results too. I also found a good friend that I could work with to commission music for my game! Despite us working on two completely different parts of my prototype, seeing their work being part of my game added more fuel to my passion! If you haven't had a chance to try the prototype, I highly recommend checking out the next build. 

What do you think of this grasslands background?

A couple examples of MANY different objects/buildings I created.

We're finally up to January 2023, yay! Here, I was determined to have my next prototype build ready by the summer. I had a lot of different "pieces" ready. Art, menu systems, battle system...I began creating the first city. I also thought it would be a good time to think about implementing the controller system. This is when I learned that Unity had an updated tool/Input System I could use that will register inputs for any controller setup I configure to each command. This was super convenient, but I also had to go back through code to start using this feature. 

Directory City with a population of one!

Since the world was beginning to take shape, I started thinking about character designs. Both NPC and important characters to the story. I probably created around 50 characters at this point and I'm sure I'll need to create more. The dialog system also need to be created. At first the dialog was simply to differ between if it's a character vs a sign, but overtime it grew more complex with needing to keep track of quests, giving items, etc. 

In February, I started to receive final designs for the game music, so I started looking into general SFX for user promptness/info in the menu system. I added a fade animation between scenes/areas. Characters would now animate for movement and face the player for dialog. 

DevBlog Part Two?

I know that I'm not caught up with all the changes, but I realized that this post is getting pretty lengthy. That's including trying to cut short on details. And I still want to include how things went with this latest playtest and where things will go from here. Thanks again to everyone that read this far. Be sure to look out for a part two tomorrow! Hopefully I won't need to create a Part Three...