Speed Limit is gearing towards its release on Steam and consoles quite soon, and we surely wouldn't want to keep you in dark on how the development of the game currently goes.
In short - the development is going great, and all we have to do is to make some smaller changes, bug fixes, and there is a console port, too, which is done by our publisher Chorus Worldwide.
So, to keep you a bit occupied while you wait for Speed Limit, we made this "news digest" of sorts that contains our blog posts that we made to date. Let's get to it, then!
How we made pixel art for Speed Limit
For this blog, we have invited our experienced pixel artist, Jurica who will answer some of our (silly) questions – just for your convenience.
Additionally, Jurica made five timelapse videos showing how he does pixel art (using Aseprite), which can help you with your pixel art endeavors.
What drove you into pixel art?
Easier learning curve and probably a bit of nostalgia. I got my first computer, Commodore 64 when I was 3.
Can you describe the process of making a pixel art character for Speed Limit?
- Our game designer and project lead describe the feature, and an effect they want to achieve with the piece required.
- Google all the stuff we talked about because I don’t know half of the words used. Also to draw inspiration from different existing technologies/equipment and make some kind of composition.
- I draw 2-3 variations following the game art style as much as I can, and then we iterate on the best variation.
- Profit
How do you make animations for Speed Limit?
It depends on what I’m working on.
If it’s character animation, I start with just a gesture line or a silhouette of the motion that we want to achieve. Then I grind out the details following the basic design in a few iterations until everyone is happy with the smoothness and motion of the animation.
How difficult is it to make pixel art?
It is easy to start and difficult to master. You can get away with a lot of stuff, but also exaggerate other. You need to learn color theory, anatomy, composition, general 2d art, basics of animation, you name it. I still feel I have much more to learn than I know and have my work cut out for me for some time.
If I wanted to start making some pixel art, where should I start?
Easiest and fastest – I would recommend an online app https://www.piskelapp.com/ that is easy to use and has basic animation covered.
Then open up a YouTube pixel art tutorial or a Twitter tutorial, e.g. Pedro Medeiros and just go wild, and most importantly, be consistent.
Read the rest of the blog.
How we made our own soundtrack for Speed Limit?
One of the primary reasons why DOOM from 2016 was so damn awesome is Mick Gordon's incredible soundtrack.
And one of the reasons why Speed Limit will be awesome is our sound designer and soundtrack composer - Matija. F YEAH!!!
I used to work as a school teacher, but following a collaboration with Gamechuck that lasted a few years, I got a full-time job here.
I started working on Speed Limit music when I first saw sketches of levels.
Since the start, we were thinking of a synthwave soundtrack.
Ten tracks in, after playing a prototype level I have noticed that there will be a problem: The game was too fast and synthwave wasn’t giving that much of a kick and adrenaline to the player.
I was thinking; “I don’t want to make another metal soundtrack. It is the easy way out and it doesn’t reflect the atmosphere of the game at all.”
So I went to explore my possibilities. I did it the fun way: played playlists of music while playing the level.
After a week or two of testing and making music, I have noticed that music from the bands like The Prodigy, Noisia, Pendulum, etc. clicked immediately.
Matija goes really in detail on how we made the soundtrack, so make sure to read his full blog!
How we made those incredible transitions in Speed Limit?
And now, the star of the show - Speed Limit transitions. Speed Limit is a genre-changing rollercoaster. The game seamlessly changes perspectives AND gameplay - as you play. Our programmer Karlo is gonna share a bit of his magic.
Some transitions were hard to explain by words so we made some animations just to be able to visualize them clearly.
Once I had that picture in my mind, I started making some preparations for both levels which was mostly positioning objects where they should be at the start or end of a transition, and discussing with lead developer Vanja to do the same for the other two levels that happen before and after mine.
In the meantime, our pixel artist Jurica chucked out all the necessary assets with their changing perspectives (ex. choppa rotating from a sidescrolling perspective to isometric perspective).
Finally it was transition time!
The majority of each transition consists of interpolating objects between key positions and scales, playing their animations at the right speed and time, and warping the background in several ways. Most of the work here was properly sequencing all the events and tweaking them to look and feel good.
Few issues arose during the making which required making some creative solutions. One example is the background during bike-to-choppa transition.
In the bike level, the road and sea background is constructed from segments, and you can see tall buildings. In the choppa level, the background is a simple warped scrolling texture of water.
How do you transition between these two? The answer is that you don’t. When the player hits the choppa after jumping on a ramp, the camera zooms into the choppa, covering up the entire screen. That’s when we remove some elements from the background (like the road and buildings) to make the transition easier.
The car-to-bike transition had a slightly different story. We had to draw a tunnel that transitions from a top-down perspective to a fake 3D perspective, ending with a camera behind the player inside that tunnel. How?
For this one, I went overboard and actually reconstructed the whole transition in 3D using the Godot engine. Then I recorded the positions of vertices of the tunnel, projected onto the camera’s 2D plane during the animation.
Finally, I added these positions into the level, and now I had exact coordinates of tunnel vertices. All that was left was to draw the segments between them. So in essence, the tunnel you see during the transition, it’s drawn with baked coordinates from a 3D animation. Whew! It paid off in the end.
How we use illusions for perspective changes in Speed Limit
We are ending this Speed Limit news digest with a real gem: a blog post by our lead programmer, Vanja who explains how we use illusions for those perspective changes in Speed Limit.
If you were to take the game camera in any game anywhere you would like to. You would soon discover that the game worlds are illusions because the content outside of the player’s view ends with empty voids.
Speed Limit is no exception to this and so our transitions are illusions where we hide things out of the player’s view or simply obscure certain elements during transitions to bring the player’s attention to a specific part of the screen.
Changing perspectives in Speed Limit was one of the big challenges because everything we render on screen only uses the X and Y axis, the third Z axis is always 0 and the camera projection matrix is set up for 2D orthographic projection.
While it is possible to go full 3D with GameMaker Studio 2, going 3D for transitions would not help making them happen.
The transition for the outro to the train section was made out of a very special train carriage. The carriage has 4 images that we stretch in order to fake perspective changes. The road is made out of 2 images (fence, and the road itself) while the train tracks are just stretched out.
The background city is just moved above and outside the screen so the water ends up covering the top of the screen. Once this change is made, a tunnel entrance always sitting outside of the camera view to the right is brought into view and it covers the train and brings the repeated tile pattern from the car section in.
After the pattern covers the entire screen we immediately swap to the car section as seamlessly as possible. The car itself has an animation where the perspective changes which Jurica animated by hand.