Hello!

Map Progress

As I work towards my new goal of finishing Act 1 and 2 in their entirety, I've finally been able to start work on spriting the game's maps! Up until now, the only non-placeholder environment in the game was of the overworld's Jade Plaza (featured in the combat demo), which I made years ago as an art style test, and admittedly to sort of prove to myself that I was even capable of drawing a city.

I decided to start by spriting another of the game's major exterior locations, West Jadewater, which happens to be the second largest map in the game, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Check out the before and after screenshots!

I've also made the in-combat versions of these locations:

I've also made one interior for this area so far--the convenience store. (Though a handful more of the buildings in this area can be entered.)

While they aren't entirely final and I might add some more details later on, I'm still very excited to finally have some finished environment assets to walk around and fight in. It's started to make the game feel more 'real' after all the years I've spent setting things up to get to this point!

Surprisingly, I've also realized that I find making maps itself to be fun. For whatever reason, I actually really enjoy spriting inanimate objects, as well as coming up with fake posters and businesses and things. I guess these are the best possible interests for someone in my position to have, though.

With West Jadewater done, I now have a good baseline on how the rest of the game's exterior maps will look, and a nice collection of generic assets to tweak and recycle, which hopefully means that the most difficult part of making maps is now complete.

It did make me realize, however, that comparatively, I might have overdone the grime and grunge on the buildings in the Plaza a little, and gave that area a more 'muted' color palette.

I think I actually like this, though, as it emphasizes the TV screen and movie posters more, and I think that sort of gives it the impression of it being an older part of town that's only had these additions recently--which is accurate to the idea of the town I had in my mind. I'll have to see how I feel about it when the rest of the map is done, though.

Random Encounters

With the maps finished, I also decided I'd implement the system for the game's 'random' battle encounters, in which groups of thugs around the city will contrive reasons to pick fights with you if you brush too close to them. You can see it in action here:

I don't want them to feel like too much of a nuisance, so the plan is for random encounters to be a relatively uncommon sight on the overworld, and for there to be a system in place that ensures the fight initiation dialogue is randomly selected from a large pool and never repeated unless every possible conversation has already been seen. I do love writing dialogue for ridiculous cartoon thugs, so I'm hoping the infrequency and absurdity of them will help keep them feeling fresh.

Thank you for reading!

- HSTopaz

(Cross-posted from the website.)