devlog 4- rgs recap and art stuff
Our display at RGS (ft Ghost in the background)
Welcome back to another Studio Inc.omplete devlog! I’m Ivy, lead writer and de facto head of marketing for Night of the Delivering Dead. This past weekend we went to the Rensselaer Games Showcase, an event held by RPI’s Game Dev Club to show off student games. We had an updated demo with fog of war up for playtesting, and we were able to get a ton of really useful feedback. We had a few bugs that we’ll need to work out, but we’ll get that posted for you to play as soon as it's in a slightly more playable state. While we were there, we were also looking for art feedback. We’re still trying to iron out a few decisions, primarily whether we keep using the pixel shader or not and what art style we go with for the card art. You can find that survey here, any feedback you have for us is welcome!
After this we won’t have another major event until March when we’ll be going to PAX East and (maybe) GDC, so we’ll be shifting into hard production mode over the next few months. We may be a bit quieter on devlogs while we’re heavily working on stuff. But, with all that being said, I’ll turn it over to artists to share what they've been working on!
Hey all, it’s Ghost, the lead 2D artist, coming at you with an update on the progress we’ve been making on our visual style. Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending a lot of my time focusing on how we can make every aspect of the game mesh well visually. It’s easy enough to design individual elements and call it a day, but it’s a separate beast trying to connect those elements.
To that end I dedicated time to making a style sheet! For our team, it was important to figure out the color palette we wanted the game to mostly follow, as well as decide on line weight, shading, all the various things that I should keep in mind when I work. This was a huge help in solidifying the foundation for our visual identity, and it’s a reference I’ll use up until the very end. If something seems to be deviating from the style we’ve set, the first thing we should ask is if there’s a good reason for it to do so. If not, then we can correct it and that way nothing feels clashing to look at!
The other thing I’ve begun to work on is our cards that you’ll use to control your various undead summons! You’ve amassed quite the repertoire of spells during your time in college, but it’s hard recalling them from memory, so it’s a good thing you’ve written them all down in your notebook! It also means being reminded of all your doodles, messages, and scribbles you made while bored in class.. Unfortunately it seems that we’ve misplaced the pages these sketches are supposed to go on, but we can still show them off for now. Hopefully we’ll be able to find them in the future.
Hey! This is Ari, the 3D Artist for the game :) So far I have been working on some rough models to populate our map, and also working on a blockout for our character. All of these models have been made in Blender, and we’re using a shader in Unity to give them their pixel look.
The vibes for the map so far are spooky suburbia, so I have created some standard houses and other buildings that are most like things you would see in a normal town (along with a giant pumpkin tile, which is VERY realistic). Going forward I am going to be working more on the character models, reworking the current models we have, adding more types of houses/buildings, and creating smaller details like trees and other vegetation. That’s all we have for now, stay tuned for more!
