Hey there 🙂
Thanks for taking an interest in Terra Maega.
There have been quite a large number of updates made to the game, including: an updated new palette, battle moves, character customization optimizations, and new dialogue designs!
I'll drop in the 2 most recent devlogs, covering these updates, right below this section to give a visual overview of the changes. No worries they're short and sweet 😉
Let's a go 🏃
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Devlog Overview
Since the last early dev update, I've actually created enough content to cover 2 whole devlogs 😅
Timing plays a huge role here. Updates discussed in the last early dev announcement came right before releasing the previous devlog. If you'd like a more direct visual overview ~ feel free to check those out below:
Colorful New Look
The world of Terra Maega has adopted a dramatic change in color 🎨 To embrace a more fantasy-like aesthetic, and help the game better stand out, I repainted the pixelart with a more expressive custom color palette:
Big Dialogue Changes
NPC Dialogues have taken a noticeable change. As much as I'd like to say my portrait art has been improving, it's still quite an ordeal getting down just 1 or 2 detailed portraits 😓. With multiple dozens of npcs planned for the game, and the possibility of further polishing / dialogue expressions added in later, it seemed like I had to remake the dialogue design to be more scalable.
Check out my solution with this sleek new design; instead of using the old detailed portraits, I've adapted dialogues to reuse the npc's battle sprites if available 💁♀️:
Battle Stat Tracking
Buttons have been added in the battle scene to keep track of current stat changes, and status moves used 📈
Custom Battle Backgrounds
Earlier on in development, I've experimented with various designs for the backgrounds used in battle. I eventually decided to incorporate the psychedelic Earthbound aesthetic to the visual design of the background, and now have a process created of making my own custom backgrounds similar to this style:
Lightning Animation Update
Updated look for the Battle Move, Lightning, incorporating my newer style of pixelart and lighting. This was actually the first move I designed for the game when I made the concept, great to see some improvement here :
Improved Character Customization
The first implementation of character creation included a pool of all possible choices you can choose from, hidden from view, and rendered / animated when applicable. Now, since these assets are rather small, the thousands upon thousands of assets used to implement this didn't actually take up much space. But it was a development nightmare 😅
Imagine thousands of sprites, animations, and animation trees needed for just one outfit haha. Not only that, there seemed to be a slight performance hit when toggling on and off different sprites for different options. So! This needed to be fixed, and I now decided to add addtional layers to the outfit (invisible to the user ofcourse) to keep some colors constant, BUT - every clothing option is now initially presented in grey - with the addition of color added on player choice! No more toggling between sprites, reuse the same clothing / body-parts, just recolor 🕺:
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If you'd like to stay up to date with development news as it's made:
🎥 I post trailers, videos, and devlogs on Youtube
🐧 Development updates, screenshots, and videos on Twitter
📷 Game-art, and short game clips on Instagram
Thanks for the support ❤️️
Until next time!