From Dev to Dev. It is time of roguelike indie games in pixelart!

Recently we talked about Witchcrafter: Empire Legends, a dark fantasy, story focused, pixel art platformer metroidvania with elemental magic, that is reaching a lot of new players every day!

A little gem made using Defold, a new engine game! Now this indie game, playable also online, has over 35,000 players! But there a re a lot of metroidvania games every day... and Paweł Jarosz, the solo dev behind Witchcrafter, shared his feedback about a new game in pixelart recently uploaded on indiexpo and added also in the Top 2 Indie Games of August 2021 video! From Dev to Dev is back!

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Hi!
Let me talk about Light Keeper by Hugo Laion, a game I spotted on indiexpo and it got me very interested and I would love to share a word or two to the dev from the dev :)

Light Keeper is a pixelart roguelike platformer with a background story about a city plagued by creatures crawling from underground which was ages ago protected by magical light that supposed to be eternal. Unfortunately it was not.

As a queen of this city you must stop them and light up those torches. This is a nice excuse for making such type of game.

After introducing the setting let me first focus on mechanics and gameplay at first and then we will go to a technical breakdown with a lot of advices not only for Hugo, but for all indiedevs!

Light Keeper is a platformer with non-intuitive, but smooth controls. The character is moving really nice, has a noticable inertion - nice acceleration and decceleration.

However, as a gamer I am used to jump with Space bar, but here Space is for dashing. You jump with W key, which is very hard for me to use in the heat of a battle.

Some controls customisation would be very nice to have (but I know how hard it is to implement!).

The character has useful platforming abilities like sliding and jumping on walls, edge grabbing etc. This is so nice to have in a modern platformer and it makes the game less stiff comparing to classic ones. I like it!

The creatures are starting to crawl from the darkness and you begin to feel the pressure. It is really hard to survive here! Random spawning of enemies is not yet balanced well.

It happened to me to meet a boss I couldn't even scratch, while he got me smashed in a turmoil of (almost unpredictable when first met) missiles trajectories.

The current, random structure of encounters made it impossible to introduce mechanics and learn useful tactics and behaviors on weaker enemies, before encoutnering a challenging boss.

You are generally put in the middle of a boiling battlefield and after just a few moments of peace, you need to fight for your life. Tension is very high here - this is considered as an advantage for some players!

When it comes to audiovisuals the first thing that attracts my attention are assets used in the game. As a dev, I am very familiar with the market and I understand that being a solodev, as Hugo is, means you would like to utilise what is available.

I do the same myself. However, this means you could see a bunch of different art styles mashed up in the game which may distract you from the mechanics.

This is also very hard to present the game to others as it lacks its unique style at first glance. I know that struggle!

The key for this to be thoughtful is to add your own spice to the game so it is unique. Hugo manages to do it pretty well.

Light Keeper is made in Construct 2 and introduces a nice lighting shader. The structure of the game is clear for me, there is also a compass in game that shows you where the closest torch is.

The GUI is pretty scalled-up in this game, covering a lot of the screen - it is also demands some time to get used to it. In general this is a solid platformer and a good roguelike with high tension.

The game is available in English or Brazilian Portuguese.

If you like such genre it could be an interesting title for you to check out!

Good luck, Hugo, with the further development! You have make a huge milestone in your career - completing a game, releasing it and gathering a feedback is undescribed precious for game devs!

- Paweł

From Dev to Dev. Baptiste Miny, from Ars Goetia, for Mutropolis!

Another post from the serie "From Dev to Dev"! This time the artist behind The Blind Prophet left us several tech-tips about a recent adventure game released on indiexpo, Mutropolis!

The Blind Prophet

The Blind Prophet is a very interesting project, developed by Ars Goetia (from France), a dark, bloody and stylish narrative driven point and click adventure where you take on the role of an apostle, sent on a mission by God to protect humans from the corruption of demons., that passed a Kickstarter Campaign during the January 2019.

Check out the tech-tips of its artist about Mutropolis! Let's go!

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This game already looks good, and is very well written. It was hard to choose any specific tips, but here are a couple of little improvements that could be made to the game.

First of all, I’d love to have some context for the plot, even if it’s nice to discover the lore through the characters’ conversations. Any presentation of the plot, even a short one or mysterious one, would help lead us into the adventure more smoothly. There might be some easy question that are easy to answer, and that would help the player understand what they later see. For example, introducing the location, and the time period the game takes place in.

Some parts of the illustrations are still too rough in my opinion. I know how it is, as an artist: you always wonder whether or not you’re going to ruin the illustration, if it loses the energy it had while a sketch. My advice would be to add some precision and stiffness where the gaze of the players will focus (and where there are objects to interact with), and let the rest of the picture be a little but rougher.

I love the work of artists like Richard Schmid, for instance, in which you instantly know where to look at, and the rest of the picture helps you focus on those elements. Also, a general tip would be to never hesitate to go for particles and special effects in your environments!

The characters have some good animations, timing and are well written and designed. I hope you’ll be able to put in some voice acting, even if it’s expensive (don’t worry if you can’t though, I can’t do it in The Blind Prophet either). An in-between solution is to go for a couple of intonations and expressions, and re-use them. It’s cheap, but effective!

As I said, I couldn’t really tell more from the demo, but it’s already a good quality production. Good luck to you.

P.S. Please, put a clear a tutorial for the inventory, I really struggled to find out how to open it! 

- Baptiste Miny from Ars Goetia

text checked and reviewed by DarknessAwaits

From Dev to Dev. Francesca De Vivo, from Fantastico Studio, for Ultimate Reality!

from Instagram

A new series of posts about Tech-tips! From expert developers and artists to newbies on indiexpo website!
We are very happy to start and to introduce Francesca De Vivo, from Fantastico Studio, an indie Team based in Rome, Italy. She is the talented pixel artist of the group, that made also indiegames for Nintendo Switch and other consoles.



She tried and analized Ultimate Reailty, a new game published in November, played by several youtubers and with an interesting pixelart style in a cyberpunk city.

Here it is the word of Francesca about this game!

"indiexpo has recently asked me to write my thoughts on a new indie game called Ultimate Reality. I’m not much of a writer, but since this is a website patronized by experts, I thought I could just muddle through by being very technical and hope you guys will get bored and give up halfway through this.
But then I started to play the game and I started taking notes and I got so involved with the process that I’m actually thinking of being serious for once in my life. This is a very interesting experiment that Indiexpo has roped me up into! Let’s get started!

Ultimate Reality

Ultimate Reality is a game that has you wear the mask of a caped superhero with the ability of shifting though dimensions. Something dark is afoot and you have to use your superpowers to thwart these evil plans! The story is set in a fascinating cyberpunk world where you jump on roofs and punch villains like there's no tomorrow.

What has made pixel art so interesting in recent years are the new takes on it we have seen in the indie games community: so many artists play around with hues, effects, transparencies and larger color palettes.
This sort of thing wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities when pixel art was born in the 80s, but what we see nowadays is a mix of the abstraction pixel art is know for and of the richness of modern game art. I would be lying if I said I didn’t love it!

Ultimate Reality does exactly that: it takes a very synthetic pixel art style and adds hues, glows, smoke effects, camera shakes and the likes. It’s a fitting choice for a rich environment like the one portrayed in the game. It creates a very fascinating atmosphere for the player to enjoy. Just look at these colors.



The neonoir vibe is very strong with this game, and the environment is so detailed and varied that it makes me want to explore.
The character design is really well thought out too and I really like how the artists create such a wide variety of enemies when constricted to such a low pixel density. As usual the less pixels you use the harder it is to make things look good, but if you do it just right, the art will look great.

One thing it took me a while to learn is that UI and HUD are the places where you have to compromise. Sometimes you just can’t cram all the infos you want into a pixel art interface.
The artists of Ultimate Reality did a neat job with the UI, and I l love the illustrated menus where you can pick your suit, check your upgrades and navigate the map, but there are places in the HUD where they had to alter the pixel size to fit in everything the gameplay would need.

As I said, you can play around with hues, transparencies and all kinds of effects, and still get the 80s vibe going, but when you see different pixel sizes on the screen, that’s when the pixel art illusion is suddenly broken. These are not the 80s anymore! Where’s my Thundercats lunchbox?
My recommendation when you just can’t go for a full pixel art interface would be to use a simple and clean regular HUD/UI, possibly one that disappears when you don’t need it. (think Celeste or Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP)

You have to keep the gorgeous UI illustrations though. I love those.



I would also encourage the artists to boost the vaporwave palette in the intro. It looks so cool in the rest of the game! Same goes for the dynamic effects like the smoke, the rain or the camera shake: I would love to see more of those in the intro too. I know that creating big illustrations and long animations in pixel art is probably the most time demanding part of the job, but I really want to know more about the world of Ultimate Reality and I hope the artists will expand the narrative.

I guess what I’m saying to the artists is: you’re doing it right, go deeper!"

- Francesca De Vivo

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