A small bug led to spawning a swarm of hammers flying around Ivan. We’re likely going to turn this into a feature soon 🙂
Category: Devlog
Total 16 Posts
Hello everyone, Flaviu here! I wanted to spend a few minutes to talk about how we came up with the art style for Yaga.
For every game I’ve worked on, the beginning has proven to be an extremely fun but challenging task, because you start off with a blank canvas (still scary to this day), some very broad limitations and your own imagination. But seeing everything come together step by step is very rewarding. And the limitations amount to having clear guidelines, which saves a lot of time and headaches along the way.
The process we used was simple: me and Andi would try out a bunch of things, then the whole team would get together and discuss. We’d talk about our choices, get feedback and then go back to draw some more. I wanted a more stylized approach, while Andi wanted something with a bit more polish and detail. This made the whole thing a bit difficult at times, but was a blessing in the long run as we would each come up with very different ideas and kept pushing each other’s vision.
Here are two small tricks that can help if you’re making an isometric 2D game in Unity. Ok, so not actually isometric, but that’s the term we’re used to in videogames, so we’ll go with it. These are quite basic and if you’re working on such a game you’ve probably already tackled them your own way. This is our take on it, hopefully it’s useful to someone.
Sprite Ordering
Normally in a 2D game there is no concept of depth, so if you simply place the sprites in the world, you’ll most likely have objects appearing in the wrong order than what you’d expect in an isometric game.
Thankfully Unity exposes Sorting Layer and Order In Layer properties for Renderers.
A quick fix is to set the value of Order in Layer to depend on the Y position of the object.
Here’s a short look on the post-processing we are currently doing in Yaga.
Unprocessed Art
Most of the art assets like characters, enemies, treasures together with all the foliage and decorations are generally used in more than one scene. And since each scene might have a different atmosphere and mood depending on what the purpose of the scene will be, the artists create all base assets independent of any lighting or weather effects.
Putting the scene together with the neutral assets looks good, but feels a bit flat and uninteresting.
In a game about procedurally generated stories, each time you play you may start in a different place, have different goals and meet different characters interacting with you. Which makes the problem of designing a main character a quite interesting one. On one hand, you need a generic character that fits any story and doesn’t seem out-of-place. On the other hand, he needs to be memorable and have a well-defined visual identity.