#kisuji

A good friend of mine gave me a picture of Star Guardian Soraka to overpaint a little. However, I couldn't stop myself and went a bit extreme with it. I started the painting in winter but stopped working on it because of my game project. Because it's not finished yet, it's just a crop but I will definitely finish it someday!

Dev Diary: Stranded in the Stars 3 - Running Animation

I was responsible for the character animations which was a new and challenging task for me.

Using some walk/run and jump cycles as reference I animated using Clip Studio Paint, usually going from rough sketches to ever more detailed versions of the frames.

One problem that I had was keeping the head size consistent so that I had to go back several times to correct that. Later on I saw some people just copy-pasting body parts for their animations... one can imagine how hard I facepalmed... why didn't I think of that?!

Looking back, I really like jump. I am sorry if the animations seem a bit janky, they actually are a bit more fluid, the gif capture compressed the animation weirdly sometimes.

Dev Diary: Stranded in the Stars 2 - The Firefly Particles

Our programmer painstakingly wrote a system for the firefly particles, fiddling around with their shapes, their radius, how bright they were and how fast they would follow the player.

One point of discussion was about how dark the level could get. At first, we wanted to make the levels almost pitch-black so that the light provided by the fireflies would be more important. A special firefly should also follow the player around at all times so that there would always have a minimum of light and a convenient npc for tutorial and story blurbs, Navi-style.

When the backgrounds were finished, however, we decided that it was too much of a waste to hide so much of the beautiful backgrounds which is why we nixed the darkness mechanics.

Some other concessions had to be made: Instead of following the player around slowly, the fireflies would keep up with the player at all times. They would also not be used as a weapon or a tool to traverse the level, but rather as "health points" taking damage would make the player lose fireflies and taking damage without fireflies would result in a respawn. This change was made necessary due to time constraints.

Like you can see from the .gifs, a few movement animations also made it into the game.

Dev Diary: Stranded in the Stars 1 - Movement

It's been a good while since I posted anything, but truth to be told, I had these gifs prepared for ages and it'd be a waste not to show some of our old documentation from the project as a sort of Post Mortem.

When we started developing on Stranded in the Stars, we had all sorts of ideas about how the game should work. We wanted light to play an important mechanic and imagined switches activating bridges made of light, platforms of light by spending fireflies on them. They were supposed to be a resource which you could use to clear obstacles, see better or use as a weapon.

The first part of development was writing a simple movement script. Aside from moving left and right the player could jump and slide on walls. As a stand-in for the later player sprite, we used a cutout of the concept art.