Hello everyone, Its Justin here, and both Rickard and I have been hard at work trying to get everything going to hopefully show for during this weeks Feedback Friday. Dont know if we’re going to make it to this weeks, hopefully we can show something! But all in all, I think we will actually go far with this project.

So, while I have been implementing GUI related things, Rickard has been working on the World Rendering and how the tiles are perceived in the world. We’re getting things done, but originally we thought of Prisma being something like a 2.5D game where the player would have so many things to do and it would just look amazing, but there were a few things getting in our way that we just said fuck it, and went top down. Which I, personally, feel that It is for the best to do this. Both Rickard and I dont know how to draw Isometric tiles that well, rendering them is a bitch, and we didnt even want to have to deal with anything like clipping with the characters behind walls, etc. This is going to be our first “real” game for our studio, something that we would love to sell, and we need something that we can actually finish.

The above image is something that I have been working on, both ideally and realistically. What I mean by that is, this is what I think the final lighting and stuff should look like with our current tile set! Dont know if it will really turn out like this, but It’s something that I will talk to Rickard about and I believe that with the two of us, we can actually do something like this.

After our 3-or-so day fiasco with experimenting with Isometric tiles, we made the finally conclusion that we should more than likely just do some kind of top down deal. I was appointed artist of the game, and Ricky went along with making the audio for the game. It sounds awesome! I really wish I could make some badass chiptunes like him!

After awhile, I got the basics of what needed to be in my SpriteSheet and so I started plotting and copy-pasting my tiles into another document to see what they would look like, and to see If I screwed up.

I have to say, I think I did a pretty damn good job. This is what the “test” scene looks like unlit currently at the moment.

A few tiles, some torches (which I provided animations for), and a bloodstain. Pretty cool, huh? I like drawing pixel Art. So much in fact that I went out of my way and purchased AutoGenTile Pro for 20$ (http://autotilegen.com/). This program is truly amazing; with this, and more than likely TiledMap Editor, im sure that we are going to produce things that are extremely good looking!

After creating this, I had this idea in my head that I wanted the characters class, whatever he chooses to be, to be completely customizable. I wanted something that was original and something that would actually allow the players class to be unique, so to speak. I came up with the idea of having the players have the ability to change their hero’s color. Having the players choose from loads of different color pallettes, kind of like dying their armor from famous games like Diablo 3, or World of Warcraft.

So to start I decided to draw the current classes only using 4 shades of Gray, something that can be uniform and allow the players some what a nice ease of customization to their hero. Yet, allowing us to keep the players with things like shading, and other pixel art tricks, like dithering correctly. Something t hat we also want to avoid is allowing the players to choose ANY four colors to pick from. This would just cause chaos and would ruin the given mood for the game. The four shades of gray that we are using based off of 256-bit RGB are of course:

rgb(64, 64, 64); // Dark Gray rgb(128, 128, 128); // Dark Gray rgb(192, 192, 192); // Light Gray rgb(256, 256, 256); // White

We are simply just loading the image into a bufferedImage and replace the pixels at every given point in the image using the specified color palette that will allow the players to get some means of character customization.

This is what a hero looks like before the applying a color palette:

Sorry for the shitty cropping, but as you can see, we are only maintaining 4 Shades of Gray for this sprite, for the parts that we would like to change color from. (Excluding his beard, we didn’t want things like blue or green beards so his beard color is something slightly off like: rgb(187, 165, 170); )

This is a temporary sprite that we are using to get everything tested and sorted out.

After achieving this, we want to move on to doing things like lighting for scene. Something that I have always wanted in my games, and something that I would love to work on. I find it so interesting! So the picture at the top of this blog post was done with the help of my trusty buddy Photoshop CS6, until we get lighting here working very soon. That is what it currently is supposed to look like.

Like I said, something that we really wanted to implement is stuff like lighting, shadows, etc. Though, this may take awhile, I think It would make the game look 10000% more cooler, and awesomer.

Just in case you want to see what the GUI is going to look like after all this is going to mesh together, I also did a mock up of what the GUI looks like currently over the image I created in Photoshop.

Dont mind the squeezing of text. I had to resize the image to fit to what I wanted but yeah, this is what the GUI is would look like over the game, when the game gets things like shadows, etc.

— Justin! (;