Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! I'm back again to share more of the development of Twosoulled, my dream project turned dream job over the past few months - with some additional updates on the upcoming demo below, so watch out for that!

I've mentioned that I'm very invested in the design of the game, but not much of an artist. I had a rough idea of how I wanted the game to feel, and I knew what I didn't want the game to look like, but I was a bit clueless when it came to figuring out what it should look like. It became clear shortly after beginning that the first and most important part of the process was finding a capital A capital D "Art Direction".

Luckily, the concept managed to grab the attention of many, many very talented people, including one particular artist. Keo - who, among other things, claimed the role of lead artist for Vagante - was more than happy to join our cause. What followed was a a series of long conversations about color language, resolution, references, punctuated by a series of sketches. I've definitely begun to learn the importance of concept artwork. This is what led to the design of Uldwin.

The way we've decided to handle character customization is pretty unique. As a wielder, you can mix and match from an array of classes and races. Each class is represented by a specific sigil - called the Mark of Steel - and on the character model, is represented by a specific set of gear. You can see here that Uldwin is wearing our basic gear for the Mercenary class.
Then, each race has its own  "ghost character", like Uldwin is for the human race. A ghost character is one who, in the canon and for development purposes, has a distinct characterization, name, and character design, but will ultimately only be used as a placeholder for players to apply a name to and turn into their own character.

Egos actually work in a very similar way. Instead of picking from a class and a race, you pick from a weapon type and material, respectively.

For both, in development, we came up with the system of "colorables". It's easiest to explain by demonstrating! Here's what the actual character model for Uldwin looks like.

He's looking a bit pale, isn't he? That's because we've separated the sprites which make him up into "colorable" and "non-colorable" ones. Any that are colorable will be able to be changed in the program based on settings that we specify. (We also use code to procedurally generate an outline around every group of sprites, like the full leg, to give a really smooth look and feel.) So in design, we create the colorable parts in grayscale with chromatic aberrations, and then when we fill it in with color (and apply the outlines!) here's what we get -

Goddamn, don't he look crispy? Now we can also apply interesting skin textures, modify the gradient procedurally between characters, let players pick skin color, and more.
Now that we've settled on a kind of art direction as well, Keo quickly got to designing some basic enemies, such as these fine gentlemen:

Are all garlothians this ugly? Definitely not. But this little ragtag bandit can't change how he was born. Poor guy.

With an art direction in mind and an array of artists hard at work, it's time for the devs to shine. And they have been going hard... Which I will cover in a following dev log!

That in mind, I wanted to announce that I've officially already run the devs out of their budget for the official Twosoulled Demo. All of the content I asked them to finish for it is all tied up and ready to be wrangled into a project you can actually experience. There are a number of things left to do, like implementing the many art pieces as they arrive and doing some level design work, animations, and countless other small things. That's all my job! So I'll be buckling down to get back into less big-picture stuff and more nitty gritty work, which may mean I won't have much time for writing these logs. The next update should have some really good news, though!

See you in the next one! Thanks as always for following along!