In this dev update video I show off footstep sounds and a sneak peak of the random island generation!
I'm really happy how my little random island generation experiment turned out so far!
All it takes is a tiny sprite (up to 96x96 pixels) with specific colors representing things like beaches, ponds and cliffs, and a 5-letter code that defines things like
-the source image (=shape of the island) used
-if the island should be mirrored / rotated in various ways
-the biome (grassland, desert, snow...)
-the weather.
I made sure to not use actually random numbers but a fixed seed that is also generated from the Island code, so the island will look the same when you visit it again (or when it reloads after a battle).
You can see more examples below.
Please keep in mind that these screenshots are taken from my prototype and lack lighting and other stuff since I did not transfer over the code to the game project yet.
I also improved the look of frozen ponds a bit with a cool reflection. The ice sparkles even!
Other small improvements:
-footsteps have an echo in caves now
-I made a new textbox with a neat walkie-talkie design. The idea is that Herby, the helicopter pilot hands you a walkie-talkie so you can communicate with him. He will take you to the randomized islands (and bring you back, hopefully!) and you can also use the walkie-talkie to fly back to an Abstrácto-Center.
The item is in the game already, now I only have to create the conversation and some additional helicopter action!
Phew, that's all for today's post! Thanks for reading!
You can now select a skin tone of your character at the start of the game (your choice affects the appearance of your rival and parents, too).
There's now a reward for connecting star constellations with the telescope. Remember that shooting star I talked about in an earlier dev update?
Seems like it chrashes somewhere on Herringtin's beach! You can dig this mysterious item up with your shovel.
I finished the whole sequence of flying to the randomized islands called Wild Shards.
Talk to the pilot Herby on the roof of a Abstrácto-Center and he will fly you to certain locations on the map (which I redrew, by the way). If you choose the Wild Shards, you can either let Herby pick a random island for you or enter a 5 letter code to fly to a specific one.
Today I'd like to share some GIFs and new artwork of Abstráctomon with ya'll.
The first GIF shows that you can now dig up some sweet money.
The second GIF shows that you can now sort the item list by name, amount, worth and most recent! This took me almost a whole week to implement because of a some nasty bugs in my code. Oh well.
The different shops in the game have a unique menu designs now.
While debugging the item list and waiting for the project to compile, I colored in the drawings of the gym leaders which you can see below.
Stay save and thank you for reading!
New Abstráctomon Screenshots!
The first time you visit a gym you'll receive a new item called League Pass. It acts as a legal document that proofs you're a registered member of the Abstrácto-League and permits you to challenge the gym leaders.
The card's electronic chip holds your personal data and records your achievements as a trainer. The front of the card is fully customizable with photos taken within the game, borders, backgrounds and effects.
After obtaining the League Pass you can access the new "League" menu.
Here you can customize your League Pass, look at so called "Promo-Passes" you might get from other trainers, view your badge collection and see if there are any trainers you've encountered before who are ready for a rematch.
I made a fake 3D effect for turning the League Pass around. You can also choose some cool "shiny" materials for it.
There are now two ways to take photos in the game:
use the Photo App on your Dex (ask the programmer in Prof. Rich's lab!) to take a picture of the various locations you visit on your travels,
or pose in front of the Green Screen in the Pengu Pool Gym to take a photo with an transparent background.
I added the option to pose with your whole team at once (before you could only pose with up to two of them).
Hope you'll have some fun with this feature and create & share some cool League Pass designs!
I finished the League Pass Designer!
In my last post I talked about designing the front of your League Pass, today I'll can show you how!
In the "League" menu, select your name and then choose "Design" start.
Choose a background, borders and a photo taken within the game. You can freely scale and move the photo as you like or choose none at all.
Select a font and color for your name...
...and add some silly decorations for good messure.
Hmm... Somehow this isn't shiny enough.
Much better!
When your're done, hit "Save" and that's it. A copy will be save to your hard drive in the "Drawings" folder where the game is located so you can share your design with others.
I bet you can create much better League Pass designs than my example!
Lastly, I'd like to share some monster icons I made for menus and stuff. These icons are just 32x32 pixels.
Kinda tough to squeeze the big bois in there, but it's fun and I can do it on the side while waiting for the game compile when debugging.
Stay save!
I re-organized and expanded the options menu in Abstráctomon with separate pages for graphics, sound, controls and other settings.
Among the new features are optional auto-saving and setting the in-game clock to real-time (a day in the game takes 24 hours) or "fast" (a day in the game takes 24 minutes and you can fast-forward time by sitting on a chair, etc.).
The game supports the keyboard and all kinds of gamepads. Since the game has been in development for so long, it even still supports a sideways Wii Remote if you still own one (but I included single Switch Joy-Con support too to go with the times). You have to connect those via Bluetooth to your PC (It might take external software / a compatible Bluetooth dongle to do so).
I know these screenshots of menus aren't too exciting to look at, but this "quality of life" stuff is worth talking about, too!
It's now possible to select which save file you want to load or save to anytime from within the game. There are 3 slots available. You could keep a manual save and reserve another slot for auto-saving, for example. Since save files are basically text files on your hard drive, they are easy to archive and share (or edit, if you're a cheater!).
If you want to play with a real-time clock, you might want to offset it. I added an option to offset the real-time clock by -12 to +12 hours. Like any other option, the change happens immediately and there's no need to restart the game.
The only time you need to restart the game is for connecting / changing gamepads, since the game might not recognize them otherwise. I recommend connecting your gamepad before starting the game, especially if it is paired via Bluetooth. That's a limitation from the engine I'm using.
I touched up some monster sprites for Leechew, Dropchew + Wetchew. Especially Wetchew looks less like a used condom now XD
Remember the random islands I talked about a few weeks ago? I successfully ported over the prototype's island generation code into the actual game. There're still a few little bugs to iron out, but it's almost done.
You can visit these "Wild Shards" via Herby's helicopter, but as you an see you have to swim the last couple of feet...
This one is pretty small, but there might be some rare Abstráctomon to find! Right now there are 4 sizes (S, M , L and XXL) along with over a dozen different biomes to discover.
Last but not least, I'd like to show off new battle backgrounds I made. These will be used in the Tuca Forest area and islands with a autumn trees.
By the way: I'd like to thank you all for reaching 1.000 downloads of my stuff on itch.io and 10.000 views of this devlog!
Stay save !
The 5 letter island code will now be shown in the main menu next to the island's name when you're visiting the Wild Shards.
I added an animation of your Abstráctomon running away when you flee from a wild battle.
I made new sprites for tall grass and reeds in cold areas.
This is just a neat screenshot I wanted to share :)
Happy Halloween!
The Wild Shards island can now have caves! I added this feature after fixing a lot of bugs my brother and I discovered recently. Some of them had pretty strange effects like turning every item in you inventory into water bottles.
Anyway, below are some more impressions of generated islands with caves!
I finished overworld sprites for the three Starter Abstráctomon so you can see them outside battles, too. Here you can see the aftermath of you first battle against your rival!
The monster that neither of you chose stays in the lab and roams around the upper floor.
I made some cac-tiles! Sorry for the bad pun.
Caves on the Wild Shards islands now feature some atmospheric sounds.
Here are more 32x32 icons!
That's all for today!
One of the unwritten rules of game design is that if you have an ice level, you gotta have a lava level as well. So I converted one of the island types of the Wild Shards into a vulcanic landscape with dead grass and lots of lava!
Lava can also appear in caves and acts as a light source.
Downhill mountain biking became even more fun with a new jumping animation.
"Shiny hunting" might be fun for some hardcore players, but most of us never get to see an odd colored monster during a normal playthrough. What if you just could ... recolor your 'mons at will? This machine in Herringtin's lab can do just that!
Put your regular old Abstráctomon in there and *BAM* it's shiny now! There's only one catch: that thing needs alotta juice. It's powered by "Shiny Pearls" that take a little effort to find. But you can even turn your starter into a shiny after the fact! Or give a shiny back its original color if you don't like the new look.
If you don't feel like cheating nature, you can still encounter shinies in the wild, too. Just ignore the machine and go huntin'. Oh, and I heard the Shiny Pearls can assist with that, too...
Here you can see my Spitsuck's new look along with improved stat-readability.
I had some fun with real time shadows in Abstráctomon. This isn't raytracing or even real 3D lighting, just some fakery with mirroring and rotating the sprite, depending on the player's position relative to the light source.
For now only the player's shadow will react to a nearby light source. If you move away too far, the shadow will turn into the regular old drop shadow again.
Just a neat little effect. Maybe I'll add it to other NPCs later if it doesn't affect the framerate.
In the team overview, fainted monsters are now highlighted with a red box to make it easier to tell how your team's doing.
I added some useful features to the A.S.S. (Abstráctomon Storage System). You can now store up to 300 monsters in 12 boxes. Boxes can now be renamed and you can change their background image.
Monsters can be moved freely between boxes and you can take a stored monster's item without having to put it into your team first.
I made some tiles for ditches. They add some depth to the sand dunes on the beach, for example.
I also changed this rock. Yeah.
Since "New Pokémon Snap" came out and the ability to take selfies with your team in Abstráctomon Venom Violet Version already exists, I thought why stop there? Let's take photos of wild Abstráctomon, too! That could be a fun side activity. And it could be another incentive to visit the "randomly" generated "Wild Shards"-islands.
Obviously, in a 2D game it'll work a little different then in the Pokémon Snap games.
So first I added a professional camera item to the game. You can lend this camera from the photographer when going on a "Photo Safari". It can be equipped similarly to other gear like the shovel. You can then walk around freely with the camera in hand and sneak up close to wild Abstráctomon...
... (which are now visibly roaming around in tall grass and other places) and SNAP! They might get scared of you and run away, so be patient!
I haven't implemented the actual resulting photo yet, but the idea is that your position and distance to the monster will be reflected in the finished photograph. It will look something like this, but with the wild Abstráctomon instead of the player character and his / her team:
Maybe the photographer will eventually rate your pictures or request some specific ones in the future? We'll see.
At this point I had some visible monsters on the Wild Shards. I then decided to let them appear anywhere in the world. They're not fully animated and simply "hop" around, but still they make world feel more alive than ever.
Outside of Photo Safaris, they can be fought and caught like any other encounter. If the spot you, they either flee or attack.
Abstráctomon you haven't registered in your DEX yet appear as a black silhouette.
To be clear, tall grass and stuff still triggers regular fights! These visible monsters are just a little bonus. They might be slightly higher level than the invisible encounters in that area.
There are still some bugs to figure out, so I'll post another update when the photo mechanic is finished. Until then, why don't you try to find all Abstráctomon hiding in this screenshot? Zoom in and have fun!
I'm currently (re)drawing back sprites for all Abstráctomon. The new sprites show the whole body. Before these sprites were cut off since you couldn't see the whole body of your own Abstráctomon during a fight, but know I need complete sprites for the photos taken with the Safari Camera. This includes drawing back sprites for the smaller overworld sprites as well. Well at least I have something to do while the game compiles...
Photos taken with the Safari Camera now include the current weather. The game saves the current time of day and location the photo was taken as well.
The photographer works for a local newspaper (the "Noddmany Times") and asks you for photos of wild Abstráctomon.
She can give you a request for a special photograph, e.g. a photo of a specific monster, at a certain time of day, in a certain location, with a specific monster type or a certain number of monsters. Such a request can even be a combination of these conditions!
If you fulfill a request, your photo earns extra points and you get paid!
During the the photo grading, the previously best photo of the monster is now displayed when you get a new high score.
The player's name and the date the photo was graded are now displayed when you view the photo album.
I also added a dialogue option to decline a request from the photographer. She'll then request a different photo.
I added two new fonts to the League Pass editor (Comic and Small).
I made new backgrounds for additional beach areas.
Here are the full back sprites for Cuddl and Grizzl.
Below are some more photos I've taken with the Safari Camera. Have a nice week!
The Abstráctomon that follows you around has reflections now, too. Your character & your monster will also be wet for a short while after exiting water. Jumping over ledges is a bit smoother now.
I remade the battle backgrounds for the ocean. Shout out to "Sketches for Humanity" and his awesome Blender tutorial!
Here you can see the new back sprite for Weremoo. Happy Halloween everybody!
I redid the battle backgrounds for tall grass, the ocean, the Tuca Track route and more. Pretty much all battle backgrounds and many other assets are based on 3D renders created in Blender. I then touch up those renders in Photoshop.
I improved the Tuca Track layout a bit once again. It's the first route in the game and connects Herringtin and the Tuca Woods.
Watch the latest update video!
In the video I show off some cool new environmental details like rain puddles, ice pillars and fancy new grass tech!
Below are some brand new screenshots showing the smoother lighting & stuff.
I didn't mention it in the video, but shadows can now have colours depending on the time of day and area. For example, shadows are now tinted light blue on snow and light brown on sand!
