New Capsule Art, Steam, and Attack Telegraphs

This week I feel like I've hit some major milestones in Bloodmoon Survivors' development journey and boy am I excited to share it.  Behold!

Bruno has finished up the capsule art for the game and I got to say he's done an unbelievable job.  I feel like it's an illustration for a movie poster and I love it.  It's also a rather large piece and unfortunately Itch doesn't like letting me share the full thing, but it's now the cover art for my page, and more importantly it's going to be the cover art for the steam store page as well!

Steam

Since I'm on the subject, I've spent some time this week updating my steam page, getting ready to launch it's store presence.  This is something I've been silently dreading because it was such a long process for my previous game Frisbros that I'd been putting it off for a while now.  Fortunately though Bruno was kind enough to resize and modify the Bloodmoon survivor artwork to cover all the graphical asset specifications that steam demanded, and I took the time to make sure all of my release information was up to date ahead of time, so plugging everything in was surprisingly quick.  

The last thing I want to do with steam before the store page is up is integrate with the SDK and take my time researching wish list buttons, achievements, and cloudsave functionality.  I don't really know what I need to learn so I took much of the week just exploring to get a better understanding of what's left to be done.

Pixel Art

In the mean time, Ref has been doing his usual wizardry and working on the next boss in the game.  This, I'm excited to say is the last boss of the first level, and with him, Level 1 will be complete art complete!  I can't wait to see how he turns out.

Also as a funny aside, as impressive as he looks, ref showed me the scaling on his legs and I thought it was hilarious.  This will be updated soon

Game Dev

From a game dev perspective I've been down in the weeds again working on something very boring but important.  Enemy Attack Telegraphs.

It has been a long reported source of contention from playtesters that they dislike the original attack telegraphs, which were circular SVGs that simply popped up and disappeared.  I used them for a long time because I couldn't figure out how to use pixel art attack telegraphs without running into the issue of having my artwork size increase because the scale of the pixels got to big.  

I reached out to get some help on support forms and fortunately I was given some help with building a shader that let me generate a pixelated circle at any radius and thickness without breaking the pixel art unit ratio for the game of 16x16.  It felt like I went completely overboard researching this just to get some pixels on the screen, but now the attack telegraphs are consistent with the rest of my pixel art and also the inner low alpha circle does this smooth expanding animation when an attack appears that helps the player understand how long they have to get out of the way before an attack lands, pretty neat! 

Next week

Next week I want to take the time and do an overhaul on the boss attacks with this new telegraph system.  At the same time I want to continue working with the steam api and requirements and hopefully get the store page approved.  Once that that happens I feel like I can finally focus on hammering down on getting a finalized demo.  This means I need screen shots and a trailer, which hopefully will be fun to make.  It's been a while since I played my game through the lens of a player just enjoying it and capturing cool screen shots.

My one last final goal is to find a musician that can help me and make some sound effects for the game.  I think that and some musical scores are the last pieces left before the demo is complete!