About Mothwing

Mothwing is a 2D top down dark fantasy adventure game with insect characters. All of the graphics are digitally rendered hand drawn and animated assets, so far done by only me. I've been world building this setting for around 4 years now. I originally wanted to do something like Redwall but with bugs. However, as I kept building on it, more and more fantasy elements began creeping in and I also started going down a Celtic inspired path.

The setting has a long timeline filled with events and characters spanning across several ages. This game takes place during the Age of Perpetual Night, a time when time stood still and night lasted for 103 years. You play as a Moth named Ash who is on a journey to the dead kingdom of Moonglow for purposes unknown to the player at first. It is the kind of narrative where you go in blind not knowing anything and the main character, plot, and lore all slowly reveal themselves and the game progresses. As such, this devlog will be as spoiler free as possible.

Gameplay

Gameplay is similar to 2D Legend of Zelda games, a top down perspective action game. You will explore the kingdom of Moonglow and its mostly unsettled lands. You will fight wild insects, cordyceps infected husks, and super natural creatures.

The NPCs that exist in this world are there to explore and reveal the lore. Not every single person is there for you. They are their own people, living their own lives. Though some have optional quest lines that further reveal the plot and lore in a more direct, character driven fashion.

The Moonstone system allows you to collect different abilities, equip them to Ash's weapon, and use them in combat. Moonstones come in three types. Active abilities which grant Ash powerful combat techniques, passive supports which modify the active abilities in certain ways, and passive upgrades which augments various statistics while equipped. With a limited amount of space to equip moonstones, you will have to choose what will serve you best in any given situation, or whatever combination you like using the most.

What I Have Done

I'm still working on the basic gameplay loop. I have the basic combat mechanics implemented, I have moonstones implemented (but not all currently functioning), two types of enemies almost fully functional (aphid and mosquito), basic cutscene control, environmental interactions (the gate lever in the video), and a "plane" system that creates layers of verticality in the 2D world.

What's Next

Currently I am redoing the visual assets. The reason why is because I realized a work flow that makes them look a lot more crisp, nice looking, and readable. I will be posting about that in an update at a later time.

I am also currently looking to get a couple people on board to help me make Mothwing. I don't think I'd be able to complete it entirely on my own. What I need is an Artist/Animator and a Composer/Sound Designer. I currently already have a Composer/Sound Designer lined up, but not officially added to the project yet. If you're interested, I have a help wanted post I made here on Itchio which can be found from this link.

https://itch.io/t/4805812/art-animation-composer-unpaid-looking-for-help-with-2d...

New Crisp Art

As I said in the previous post, I've been redrawing all the current assets with a new workflow that results in much more crisp art. The way I originally did it was that I was drawing all the art at its in game resolution. Which was really hard to keep the color within that thin line art. Being so meticulous with it was taking up a lot of time. So this new way I've been doing it has been a bit faster.

What I Did Differently

This time I drew each asset at 4 times its in game resolution. All the line art was also done with 4 times the final size. So where I would use a 4 pixel brush before, I am now using a 16 pixel brush. In turn, this also gave me room to use different line weights. For finer details I switch to an 8 pixel brush, which, when scaled down, results in a crisp 2 pixel line. With the lines this big at the higher resolution, I am much more easily able to keep the color within the line art which saves some of time. I haven't finished all of it, there's still some more to go, but a lot of it has been redone. I'll show some examples.

Examples

Here we have the main character, Ash. On the left is the original art, on the right is the new art. Below is full resolution art. You can see that the lines are a lot more crisp and the details, especially on the wings, look a lot better.

 

Here we have UI icons for the bow ability moonstone. The new one is a lot more readable and less "blobby" due to the higher starting resolution. Being able to use a thinner brush weight for the string and arrow makes it looks a lot nicer too.

This is a sprite for a blade of grass found in many locations. The original art is on the left, and the new art is on the right. I've taken the opportunity of redrawing the assets to change it up in some places. In the original art, it kind of just had a flat cut off on the bottom. On the new art you can see that the grass curls up to a tube on the bottom, much like an actual blade of grass does.