Devlog #2: Hokori - Gameplay and Visuals

Placeholders! There's an initiative tracker at the top of the screen now, and different characters have different sprites. Character death is handled, targeting works, I've even got some basic animations set up. I'm actually enjoying playing this really really rough version of the game a little, and I think I'll enjoy it more once I put some thought into balancing and creating more than the 4 actions I've got so far.

But as I'm developing the game, I keep thinking...what am I going to do about visuals? I'm not a pixel artist, and while I've started learning a few times, I just don't enjoy it. The sprites above are purchased, but I've got a certain aesthetic I'm envisioning for the game and would have to put a fair investment towards paying an artist for a cohesive set of art. However...I've dabbled in 3d - not enough to be confident with a full 3d game, but I was thinking...what about 3d -> 2d shaders?

I grabbed a model from arte_art_dev to use as either a base to create other characters from, or possibly just as a quick test for the rendering pipeline I'm putting together. First up - lights!

So we've got a nice 3d low poly model. Unfortunately it doesn't fit in the scene at all, and the low-poly 3d aesthetic isn't what I'm going for. Time for some pixels...or more accurately, let's reduce the pixels a lot.

This actually took a while cycling through some different pixelization algorithms before I landed on this reasonably nice setup. But...this hits the typical issue that many games using 3d -> 2d rendering will hit - and it's definitely prevalent in a lot of older games generally. The colours are just a bit muddy - that red sash is now mostly brown. It's just a bit rough generally - so let's step back a bit.

I've added a "cartoonify" filter over the base model. It flattens out a lot of the lighting, and pulls the colours away from each other - a much better base for the pixel shader - let's put that back over the top:

The colours are a lot flatter now, and stand out against each other. I also think that it looks pretty nice in action as well, and because the different parts of the 3d model are different meshes, I can even add in effects like a ghost-trail for the sword to help sell the movement. Definitely need to work on my animation timing as well though!

I'm not actually 100% sold that this is the way I want to go, but I'm liking it a fair amount as a proof of concept. It's definitely a solid start - the next thing to experiment with is some attack animations and swapping out the current tiny sprites with this style to see how it works. Still, this'll be a work in progress in the background while I keep working on the primary combat features in the game, which'll be the focus of my devlog - the structure of the combat system!