#metroidlike

Only 10 days left until Dinomelt’s web launch!!

In the meantime, here’s another look at Fregg, the first of a few friendly creatures you’ll find in the depths of the clay-infested cavern and one that will help you along the way with a few ‘clay-improvements’ in your quest (also one of the most fun characters to draw!).

More than once (and specially on a looong project), as one grows and develops better and more efficient ways to make things (an evolving artstyle, a cleaner way to program, new approaches to world and level design…), it becomes reaallly tempting to just go back and re-do the whole thing.

During the 2+ year development cycle of Dinomelt, this has happened more than once: The protagonist, Gwrep, had a complete sprite-re-drawing halfway through the project. Also, recently, plenty of the main background assets and platfoms got a color, line and overal polish update, so that most aspects of the game had a more consistant line. As an example, take a look at this gif from version 0.4 (late 2015!)

It was looking and working fine, but the animations on the protagonist, Grwep, weren’t the most convincing, they were stiff, and the ‘run’ was a bit off... Months later I went over its whole group of animations to make them smoother with stronger poses, and a better sense of weight (specially on the runcycle).

World II - Hworb Assets! And we have a little update on these, I’ve been redesigning plenty of assets lately to get a stronger color palette for each of the main 3 worlds, and enrich their environments.

WHERE is the game? The latest ‘release date’ was “late January”, which is kind of gone, so it may be good to stop estimates for a while. Turns out, starting February, I can announce that, after heavily focused weeks, the game at last is on a 'COMPLETELY PLAYABLE' (/beatable) state! 

The game is done in most aspects of production, the whole world map, dialogs, sound effects, credits, secondary animations, enemies, debugging, typography... even a set of working “achievements”! (prepared to work as ‘Medals’ on Newgrounds), most of those details, which compose the elusive and rarely accurate 'LAST 10%’ of work (this last stage has taken around 2-3 busy months so it may aswell be as big as a 25% of the whole work-time). (picture related)

The only aspect which is still on production phase is the music, which will take a bit longer considering the final volume of music needed for the game. While it’s reeeeally tempting to release it at last, as the music gets done it will be a good time to test and polish the latest details hoping for a good web release, looking for a good week when I’ll finally announce a real release date. In the meantime, here’s a little peek at Fruwz, one of the most heavily clay-morphed areas of the cavern.