8-11-12 - Soldier Of a Bit of Progress

Hey. I've been making a lot of progress on Soldier Of recently. Better graphics, bug fixes, a new item implemented - the next demo should be really great!

I want to build up the maps in the game to be 'thicker'. I tried that in the screenshot to the left. Something I didn't like about the maps in Soldier Of was that they felt sparse, as though they weren't connected, or even individually important. I want to give the feeling of moving through a city, with lots of streets and alleyways, even if they can't be traversed, just to get rid of that empty feeling. I want it to have a lot of a 'secret' feeling, where you don't really know what could be around the next turn, or what will happen next. Hopefully I can get the level of detail on the maps that I want for the whole game. :S

I also fixed up the colors to be less eye-poking (in a bad way) and be more subdued, while still keeping a colorful palette. I've also added a filter that appears over the screen if you're outside to give more of an 'outside' feel. The unfiltered shot is to the left, while the filtered shot is above. The characters now have a colored outline, which (I think) makes them stand out compared to the more monotone background black-outlined objects, though the enemies get a little lost in the filter effect.

I've also stopped using the built-in light shading of Blender, and just have shadeless objects now, with pixelled shading effects. It's a more smooth, cool effect, in my opinion. I probably should have done it from the beginning.

I've also made a logo that should appear at the beginning of Soldier Of, and should appear at the beginning of my other games. I animated it with Blender (it can do so much)!  I didn't put a lot of thought into it, though, so maybe I'll need to really work on it to make it really shine.

An idea that I liked was that the logo would appear differently depending on which game it is. For example, for this, the logo might have a sneaking character, or a character holding something up, while the logo for a game like Dungens might be about placing blocks and performing acrobatics. It could use a little fine-tuning, but I like it a lot. :)

Anyway, it was a short update, but that's all for today. Thanks for reading! If you want to follow day-to-day progress, follow me on Twitter!

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