Welcome to our Spooky Dev Log!
It's October... the month of Halloween! What better month to talk about the horrible creatures in Azur!? In this Dev Log, we will tell you more about the creatures of the Plague as well as the process for creating one of the basic enemies that the player will encounter in the game.
Several years ago, a meteorite hit the lands of Azur. The fragments of the meteorite dispersed through Azur polluting the lands, and a threat of strange creatures known as “The Plague” arose. These are infectious creatures similar to bacteria that are known for consuming everything that gets in their way.
From hazardous lands to aggressive enemies, the Courines must always tread lightly when walking through unpopulated lands.
For this devlog we wanted to go in depth on how we created the basic enemies that the player will find. When designing new enemies, we follow this process:
Step One: Starting from a cool idea
When adding a new enemy into the game, we usually start by creating model sheets with different designs and try to have a clear idea on what will be the purpose of that character in the game. However, sometimes a cool idea can come unexpectedly from one of the team members! For example, in this case , our art team came up with an enemy that could split in two and could continue fighting.
We thought it really captured what a creature from The Plague would be: Relentless, organic and hard to defeat. We decided to explore this idea further.
Step Two: Behavior Proposal
To avoid creating unnecessary animations, our Lead Programmer creates a behavior proposal using key frames from the first draft. This allows us to have a feel from the enemy inside the game, and play around with the idea.
Step Three: Polishing the Design and Color Pallete
After the basic behavior has been decided, we make visual adjustments to the character so it can fit properly with the rest of the characters. We also try on different color pallets through scenes of the game so the character is not lost in the background or stands out too much.
Step Four: Key Animations
From here on now, we create all the hand-drawn animations from a rough sketch to cleanup and then color. Here are some examples of the finished results:
Step Five: In- Game Implementation
Finally, we connect all of these finished animations with the game character. In this step, the enemy behavior will have some minor changes in order to fit the proper timing of its new frames.
Additionally, tuning all of its stats like speed, damage, etc, will be done as an interactive process when playtesting the game. Very rarely we will make adjustments to its animations to fix some of the issues until we find the right balance for them in the game:
We hope you liked this month’s Dev Log! Stay tuned for more updates on the development of Greak and Happy Halloween!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1311070/Greak_Memories_of_Azur/