Not-Animal Crossing

[Silversea]

So this is a sort of project I've been working on, which I guess I'm committed to this now. It started as a fan game of Animal Crossing, but I want to go beyond that and develop something more unique. My main inspirations are AC of course, Harvest Moon, and some others.

Here is the first "screenshot", from June:


The game is a village simulation similar to the inspiration games. You play as an animal character and go about the day occupying yourself with hobbies, socializing, and whatnot. As time passes other areas open up to explore. With each passing hour and season the world changes around you, and the village always finds a way to keep your interest (or so it is planned!).

[iyenal]

Interesting, I like the UI and flower collect animations.
I think that you can find better fonts. And maybe add grass sprites.

[Silversea]

Oh man yes, you can bet that crappy font is getting replaced ASAP.

(edit: as soon as some actual gameplay shows up)

I do want to work on more vegetation for the background. Much of it will be based on gameplay though (planting flowers, shrubs, trees).

[Silversea]

I'm still not quite satisfied with water animation so I've been messing with that (again the gif isn't saving colours properly but you get the gist of it).

The more bluish hues are because of the day/night cycle. Eventually the evening cycle will go from green-orange-blue but right now it just does green-blue.



Also a WIP fishing rod because why not.

[Silversea]

The bridges were way overtextured for the game style so I've been working on those...



Still not perfect but an improvement.

Mostly been doing technical stuff recently, like AI and such.

[korusan]

It's never a bad idea to tone down when things start looking too good, ie when they're better than everything else. The concept itself is cool, but you'll definitely need to find some niche to separate it from Animal Crossing.

[Silversea]

Fishing is more-or-less ready to go. I can't believe it took nearly a week to smooth this out, man...

It is apparently not possible to upload perfect gifs, so once again you'll have to just ignore the crazy graphic freakouts present:

[Silversea]

I've been messing with the tree style for a long time. I think I'll go with the middle one. Any thoughts?

[Filler]

I like the shading style of the middle, but the texture on the left's greenery looks better.

I personally think the trunk is a tad too flat, though.

[Silversea]

My problem with the texture on the left is it looks too uniform and not very natural, which is how I came to the middle image. Yeah I've been thinking about the trunk. I don't want to over-define it otherwise it'll break away from the game style, but on the other hand...

[Silversea]

Proof that I still exist below. Since I want to start working on trees and background stuff, it is time to code in the seasonal and day-night changes. I'm going beyond the "Add a dark layer over the screen and its night time" approach, and actually changing the colours of many things. That makes the time of day cycle feel more legitimate (or at least I feel it does).

Also preview of the new interface w date and time.

Top two are summer, bottom two are spring. Full size here: http://i.imgur.com/wa2dG25.png

[Filler]

Looking good!

I tried to make the tree sprite look a tad less flat. Just defined the the trunk to make it less straight up, and the shadow is now more shaped like the shrubbery, and I added a tad of anti aliasing on where the trunk reaches the shadow.

[Silversea]

Looking good!

I tried to make the tree sprite look a tad less flat. Just defined the the trunk to make it less straight up, and the shadow is now more shaped like the shrubbery, and I added a tad of anti aliasing on where the trunk reaches the shadow.

Having a less-straight trunk is actually a very interesting idea. My only concern is when you start applying specific characters to the sprite sometimes it can have the opposite effect. For instance, if you curve trees you then add the implication that they are natural and can bend. If you then have an entire screen of 20 trees all leaning right, it would look odd. You then need sprites of trees leaning left, and need to code a randomizer that spreads them out evenly.

I'm instantly down with changing up the shadow and anti-aliasing the base, though.

[Silversea]

Happy to report that fishing is finalized. Just need to draw all the fish.



I'm starting to work on text boxes, which means I've been experimenting with how I want to handle portraits. I'm happy to admit I'm pretty poor at portrait art but it'll do for now. I'll probably be editing the eyes at least for the next year. The bottom part will be covered by clothing, based on what the NPCs are wearing.


Alternative shading on right.

PS. Is it good to have the portraits looking directly at you (the player), or slightly to the left. I'm not sure.

[iyenal]

Try Lorem Ipsum for placeholders. It is useful to concentrate on game design.
Anyway good progress.