Updates have certainly slowed, but honestly, not much news I can report besides livestreaming, my birthday and continuing to work hard on Blackmask.

I’ve been working on concept environments for Blackmask. They won’t be in color in the game, but it helps to have a sense of art direction. Since my time is crunched, I’ve ended up coloring art I draw in my SketchWallet and not getting insane about detailing them.

The idea is a sort of “Tutorial Island” that Cole goes to hunt for a secret treasure. An ancient race of chimera known as Owlbears used to reside within these buried ruins. This is mostly a “lore justification” to why there are ancient ruins to treasure hunt in. But the Owlbears probably won’t appear themselves as enemies or NPCs.

I want to set the art direction to show game mechanics to teach a player by doing some style and color explorations for Blackmask to figure out the general direction to make the future pixel art. The color limits are a challenge sure, but If Nintendo can do it, so can I.

The big plan is to make sure background and foreground elements are clear for 2D platforming. I even figured out the closest resolution 16:9 ratio for low res Game Boy screen size: 256×144 going off of the original Game Boy’s 160×144. This’ll make planning for widescreen a snap!

Been trying out working on grid paper to see if this’ll be helpful for game dev stuff. It’s a bit of work, but the grid paper and looking up some tutorials on converting sketches to pixel line art have been of great help!

I’ve been figuring out some stuff for an interior tilesets. These things still need some work, but I’m stepping along. Truth be told, I’m spending too much time making the background pillars modular. Adam tells me Unity only really needs it for the actual interactable stuff Cole needs collisions for. I’m getting frustrated by it, so I’m doing my best to take breaks for now.