Seq.Breaker Dev Journal # 9

Earlier today, I sent the track list/descriptions to my composer for this project, C. Filipe Alves. I'm really excited to hear what he has in store for me.

While I still have the player character sprites that were created by "Captain Ricco", I haven't found an artist to tackle the environments, objects, NPCs, and enemies just yet. And there's two reason for this: one, I'm not sure what I want stylistically, being torn between going really colourful and cartoony and going really moody and muted. Two, I'm not sure quite yet at this point in the process exactly how many sprites I'm going to need and what they're going to be of, and I'd rather give a prospective artist a complete list instead of peppering them with updates.

But while I'm making the game, they have to look like something, and so I've quickly whipped up some temporary sprites. They're pretty awful looking, I know, but they work better than coloured blocks and circles at the very least.

Anyway, I thought I'd share some of them.

Here's a health power-up. This doesn't restore health (that's what save points are for!) but rather ups your maximum.

This is a piece of destructible rubble hanging from a ceiling or from another piece of rubble.

Here's a very basic, stationary enemy that spits out projectiles upwards.

This bloke's yellow shell repels your laser-beam weapon, requiring you to fall back on your weaker concussive blaster.

Now for a look at the general idea of the boss of the first level. This first design looked a bit off-- even off-er than my other terrible attempts at artwork--

-- and so I took away the eyestalk and added some more shelled armour around the eyeball.

The boss's eyeball is its initial weakpoint; keeping with the "yellow shell = laser proof" motif, the player needs to use their concussive blasts to damage it. (That said, the laser does come into play during this fight.) Blast it enough, and the eye goes closed, disabling another area of its defense-- you'll have to play the game and see the fight to see what I'm talking about-- for a brief period of time.

But the change was too subtle. Let's look at those two sprites again so you can see what I mean:


And so I added these three red marks to call attention to the boss's stunned state (the boss will also be flashing when stunned/damaged, something that's done with an alpha overlay).

Again, this sprite won't make it into the final game, as it looks god-awful, like all my sprites do. But it does give you the general idea, and having figured out some of the game's potential visual language-- calling greater attention to the stunned state, the use of yellow as a laser-proof colour-- it should help my eventual artist(s) when the game gets to that point.