If you’ve been following my art and this blog before 2020, you know that I draw a lot of anthropomorphic animal characters. These animals were ideas for characters and world for a webcomic idea that I was thinking about for the past nine years.

It would’ve been the ongoing adventures of a plucky adventure merchant named Cole Blackmask as travels to strange lands, questing for loot to sell, battling powerful warriors and mystical forces who reside all over this funny animal world.

The core premise of the comic is that Cole is a wandering merchant whose adept at a variety of weapons to protect himself and advertise them to other would-be warriors and heroes. These days, I was a lot of time working on a bit of a pitch to myself, so that it didn’t sound too weird or self-indulgent.

I’m still a bit embarrassed about it despite posting this stuff all the time. In between freelance art jobs, I was making art and writing some sort of beginning comic for Blackmask, and I was struggling with it because, like any other thing, I wanted it to be good.

One day, around June 29, 2020, I got bored and started making a Gameboy sprite sheet because I had a passing interest in trying out of pixel art. Gameboy art was simpler for me to start since I didn’t have to worry about color palettes.

I showed my initial sprites to my friend Adam Mortell, who’s a programmer friend I worked a lot with on various projects like game testing at Game Refuge Inc, and a bunch of game jams. Adam really dug it what I drew, as he’s a big pixel art fan and was interested in trying to get his working in Unity. I was cool with it because I planned to learn Clip Studio Paint’s animation features and make animate it anyway!

He dropped a few videos my way and I really blew my mind! Adam asked me more about my comic and the world and I chatted with him about my initial ideas for the comic and where I wanted to try and go with it. He liked my designs for the animal characters and the weird world I made up for that, and he convinced me that it would be cool to make a video game about this. I thought making a video game would be a long down the line pipe dream, but this is the best opportunity I’ll ever have!

Around June 12th 2020, Adam made a video testing Cole navigating a tile map. On seeing it, I gave him some animation notes to explain what sprites I used for the proper animation and timing. I wanted to do more figure out an art direction for the backgrounds, so they have more clarity, and get a build of the game in my hands to I can try it out for myself and see if it feels good! We’re pro gamers, so we’re gonna do it.

I’ve been testing out animation stuff and it’s opening my eyes to animation flaws and spots where I need more frames. On a more positive note, I’m learning about Clip Studio Paint.I started with some simple weapon animations in that old school one frame style, but I think it’s not enough.

Around June 16th, 2020, Adam made a weapon and effects test to see how weapons and projectiles would look. I’m a bit worried that the color changing might break the Game Boy look, but it could work on certain color splashes, but I’d have to see when we get further.

An actual Game Boy version would just be normal GB colors sure, and a Game Boy Color could also be set with different color limits. But as a Unity game, this doesn’t have such limits. But what’s really stopping us from just making a colored version, if we’ll just have colors anyway outside the aesthetic? The Game Boy look is the most we have going for it, so the color stuff would need have a cool gameplay reason to justify this. Some ideas we thought of is that the magic system would use the colors or have certain events trigger colors but who knows?

I did some bow animations and it was really messing with me how to incorporate the strings in animation. Originally there were stings for this bow, but even those were too thick for the look. I looked at sprites from Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters for ideas of how to make bow and arrow pixel art and Pit doesn’t really have strings for his bow really

I spent plenty of time figuring out wall climbing animations. I had a harder time figuring out climbing a ledge, so this is more unfinished.

Around July 21, 2020, I finally got shields and a running animation done. It was a nightmare of figuring out tail animations. Working on this gave me flashbacks to college animating raccoons again.

I updated some actual swinging animations. I spent a bunch of time figuring out a good feeling swing that would make good gameplay. I can’t decide on the speed of the sword swings. I’m wondering should attacks be slow and deliberate like Castlevania or fast and mashy like Zelda? I even got suggestions to make different attack strength’s like a fighting game, so a slower strong attack and a weaker fast attack.

So, @AMortell is excited that he got running to work. #gamedev #IndieGameDev #indiedev #pixelart #videogame pic.twitter.com/lZ1OmcUBhG

— Mastafran (@mastafran) August 2, 2020

There’s still a lot to get done like enemies and things like that. I got a few sprites going so that’s next in Adam’s list to stuff to work on. I myself want to get down one more boss and some environment stuff down, so we have something more concrete to get out.

We still have no clue about the scope or scale of the game, and I’m doing my best to manage it to the limits of the Gameboy while pushing for something unique. This is the most I’ve done for making a video game, and I don’t even know if it’s going to work out or not. But even if it fails, I have a new animation portfolio and proof that I made a video game! Wish me luck and hopefully I can get this stuff done as I work on many other things.