Light & Dark is a 2D action-platformer game. The game will focus less on platforming challenge but more on combat. It will have 2 playable characters, for now named Light & Dark. These are adoptive brothers who are shunned by society due to their social position. They grow up together on the streets of a busy medieval city. One day they're woken up in the middle of the night as they scream in agony. The pain that seemingly came from nowhere leaves behind weird symbols on their shoulders. As they try to find out what these ancient unknown symbols mean, they will go on a journey to discover its meaning and their true identities.

Currently I'm the only developer/designer working on the project. This means that I must balance artwork and programming. Light & Dark will both be playable with both having different stages for the most part and some shared stages which play out differently based on which you choose. Light will focus on ranged combat and will  be less agile to compensate, while Dark is more agile but will have a melee move set. There will be hidden stages, power ups and quests. It all sounds very ambitious, especially for 1 man. I don't intend to rush this project to release. It will eventually release on both PC and consoles. I'm currently still learning both Unity and drawing pixel art. 

Now let's address the elephant in the room. If you've read this far, you must probably be thinking: "Oh wow another 2d platformer, how original". I understand that the market has been overflown with 2D platformers with a retro pixel-art design look in the recent years. These game range from small indie devs to large scale projects. I can't guarantee that everything in this game is original and never done before. I'm writing a story that I like and hope to build a nice thematic game around it. But yes, the game will be inspired by the great games that came before like the MegaMan Original/X/Zero, Metroid, Super Mario series. These games defined the 2D Action platformer genre. And regardless of how many games there have been in this genre, it's been my favorite genre since I was a young child. Only fitting that my first large game project is in this style.

The current look of Dark. At the moment this is the best I could do art wise. However thematically I'm not satisfied with this look. It feels too modern for a medieval world. But I have to balance out the work, so the animations and designs will be reworked down the line. But for now this is the idle animation. 

Running

Crouching

Jumping and falling

Wall sliding.

TODO: I would like to add animations for landing and jumping off the ground and walls.  It would make the transitions much smoother. 

I'm currently working on a nice satisfying dash move for Dark. A Dash that also keeps its momentum when you transition to a jump. I currently don't have a completed dash animation, so I'm working with this temporary image.

After this, I will add different attacks. These will include basic combo attacks and directional attacks in air and on ground.

At the moment I restarted the project due to certain mistakes I made regarding my code. I didn't have a Github backup and accidentally deleted some of my components. Lesson learned. Always back up from now on!

This works out well however. As I recently read about implementations of a Finite State Machine. So currently I have the project remade with almost everything back to where it was. However now the code is written with a State Pattern design. While the lines of code have increased, it has become easier to implement transitions from one action to the next without 40 lines of if statements to loop through each Update cycle.

This is my 2nd attempt at making a half decent tileset for the game. I significantly underestimated the challenge of drawing good pixel art environments. I dare say its even more difficult than drawing characters themselves.

Making decorations like rocks and grass patches proves to be the most difficult thing at the moment. I can't seem to get it right. Needs a lot of work.

This is supposed to be an infinitely scrolling parallax background image of mountains in the distance. It looks out of place, stylistically compared to the tileset and player. Much like everything else art related, it will need a significant rework down the line.

A test scene setup with the assets of the previous post

This will eventually be a first stage with ruins, mountains and much more life. At the moment its only function is to test and perfect Dark's movement.