Hello everyone! It's the start of summer and the god of seasons is finally showing her face around.
This week continued work on the backgrounds for slums, animations for various Mariya cutscenes, and the final touches of Shoko's boss fight in the forest.
When we first outlined the map for the City, we started off with some kind of enourmous abstract mess of shapes. Gradually, we polished things up, and were left with a Tiled map of the entire area. The slums in particular was designed to be intentionally unstructured. Rather than having a deliberate plan, we imagined what it would be like if a city grew naturally, starting from sources of water and sunlight, and growing outward in an endless sprawl.
The artwork for the slums aims to portray this. As we're filling in the map in actual sprites, we're making use of hand-drawn sprite work. We're intentionally avoiding hard edges and cubicle-style architecture in favor of stray pipes, windows, and platforms. This week was a first venture into this style of art, and we will continue trying to find this feeling!
On the cutscene side, we're working from the beginning, starting from the player's fated encounter with Mariya! Mariya's a true god of adventure, and to capture her personality, we're aiming for light and energetic animations. Daniel and Jessica recently got the the walkthrough for how to build cutscenes, so I'm excited to see what can get created!
On the forest level, the miniboss Shoko has been finished! Shoko is a forest spirit, who grew up under the wing of the god of fertility, Cadence. Shoko is simple minded and attacks you right away, only to get reprimanded by the overlooking Cadence when defeated. But both seem to hold some kind of hard feelings against the incoming humans...
Storyline wise, Rona and Jessica had some great inspirations about a giant chocolate fountain appearing sometime during the shopping arcs.. we'll see how that turns out. On music, Joey's gone above and beyond and got us a version of the office fantasy theme played by a live violin.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RQBpPnvEiQEWDomTIZygxtOAc42OgqEx/view?usp=sharing
Finally, life-wise, summer is here! A bunch of us are finally free from classes and tests, and it's a great feeling to finally have the time to make Alight come to life!