I fear you would end up with multiple flow sheets. Doable, absolutely Worth it? Almost only if youve got substantial reason to do it Like another village with frog culture where it isn't frowned upon to swim etc --> wet frlg infrastructure exists--> lore dictates even raccoon might swim --> we dont need to load both flow sheets and were done
also, pixel portrait advice (from a graphic designer used to keeping things stylistically consistent): The new versions are beautiful, but are very different in tone from the rest of the game. When I look at the portraits alone, I'm getting "realistic and serious visual novel". The high level of detail, realistic color palettes using many neutral colors (beige, navy, brown, etc), and realistic anatomy/proportions and expression are all communicating that they're very grounded in reality. Everything else in the game is very stylized and /not/ grounded in reality. The grass is lime neon green, the world is full of silly little monsters with cartoonish proportions, the level of detail is very low and abstracted, and the color palettes are bright, saturated, and not too complex. advice: - When exploring to find a stylistic direction to go in, it's much more helpful to draw a lot of WILDLY different things at first, then analyze what were the best and worst options, and WHY they're the best and worst. Then draw some that aren't super different from your best options, and analyze those. Then draw some that only have minor changes from your best options on the last round. - It's also best to work roughly and quickly to do more tests and get more information faster, leaving polished work to the later rounds. What could you do to explore stylistic direction quickly? Get some screenshots of critter crosser where you WOULD put a talksprite, take them in photoshop, go on google images, and start dragging and dropping portraits of people over the background of your world and see who looks at home there. Try WILDLY different styles. Try real photos with the kuwahara filter. Try some of the most tolerable caricature style art you can find. Try some edward mucha art nouveau illustrations. Try black and white portraits of people with the most interesting faces you can find. What about childrens book illustrations of adult characters? What happens if you scrunch them all down into a blocky compressed "pixel art" and tweak the color palette? Seeing what works best/worst and asking /why/ will give you a LOT more information and a solid direction to aim for when doing the actual pixel art. - color pick your palette for the portraits directly from the current game assets. Add new colors to it as needed for skin/clothes/etc. Really try to keep it constrained to only a few useful colors, and make sure new colors look nice next to the old ones. - keep reference screenshots of the current game in the background as a reminder of what kind of world these characters would inhabit. What kind of characters would the people playing your game expect to live there? - Use a larger less detailed pixel grid that more closely matches the level of detail you have on the background assets. also, please keep those previous pixel portraits in an easily findable folder and roll them into the next game or sell them as game assets, they're gorgeous and you should def use them in the future, just not for this game :) Hope that's helpful, good luck and I look forward to seeing what you do next devlog!
the portraits look like pixelated photos. I think simplifying them while keeping the facial and body proportions might fit better with the games style and stop them from looking childish
@@drakesword5214 +1, the NPCs just need to have some odd "irregularities" to it, as actual human people do. Like this one NPC is handsome AF but they have an unusual nose, or this other one has their eyes a bit further away from each other than the rest of them. You know, like actual humans heh
@@drakesword5214 I think there's probably a middle-ground between Stardew Valley and something more realistic that he seems to want. He should look towards Japanese games. Anime has always had a good blend between realism and cartoonish designs and while I don't necessarily think he should try to recreate an anime style for his characters (that wouldn't look good or fit his game), there are probably some tips he could take from there that would help. Maybe just aiming for a Stardew Valley art style for portraits and then stylizing it less (or more in his own tastes) would be the solution, but I don't know. I'm not an artist, myself.
Absolutely. There's a middle-ground between childish and realistic. Hands down a realistic aesthetic will always clash with the rest of the aesthetic of the game, I think he has to come to terms with that. Chef RPG or Stardew are places I think he should look to for inspiration on how to make stylized characters in that vein.
I think the more realistic art style is interesting, tho I feel like it can get boring very quickly when the designs all look very similar. I would suggest playing a lot with facial features to make them all look very distinct.
yeah definitely, visual distinction will really help keep players longer. for me is the npcs all look to similar i find it harder to remember their story
What about mostly realistic but with like a small % stylization, usually in the eyes. Something maybe like a pixel version of the characters from Mouthwashing? The current raster you showed off kinda looks like the same base girl with different hair and clothing.
I agree - there's still a sort of seriousness in these portraits that's really not visually represented elsewhere in the game. AKA critters are cute and funny looking
Agreed, cartoony portraits fit the art style much better, the realistic ones look too much like he used AI to generate a picture of an attractive woman, then threw it into a photoshop pixel filter.
First thing's first. I absolute adore the game you are making, and wish nothing more than it becomes a wonderful thing that many can enjoy; chiefly you :) I like the new character portraits. If I was forced to nit pick, I think the reason character portraits kind of stand out so much is the palette complexity. Your in world npcs are very simple in their palettes, often having 3-5 maybe 9 colors at most. While the portraits are vastly more complexed with hundreds of colors at the least. Again I do like the new portraits, but if I had to pick out why they stand out so much I'd say this.
the portraits look honestly stunning but i agree that they're a little jarring. I wonder if having a portrait at all is necessary. someone else brought up the idea of stardew valley-esque portraits but I personally think having no portrait at all would work fine (like Terraria?). I guess this would mean the sprites of the characters would have to be more individualised so that each npc still can be told apart.
This is gonna sound harsh and kinda cruel but the portraits look a bit like they're AI generated. They're of course not actually AI generated, we see the WIPs in the video, but they have a lot of the same problems that AI generated art has. Like an AI generated image, I cannot tell what the intent behind the image is. The characters are sort of generically pretty and quarter stylized, three quarters realistic, but I could not tell you anything about what sort of person the characters depicted in those portraits are supposed to be. And sure they're probably just supposed to be generic NPCs, but you can make someone look generic in a way that feels intentional, but these designs feel accidentally generic.
3:58 i think itd be fun if some npcs have a chance to favour expensive tiles on occassion, jaywalking, desire paths, tripping over bushes, getting agitated if someone in front of them walks too slowly
@@Fannerable This could potentially also get used to classify movement for your creatures too, though I'm not the visionary so my opinion comes with a free grain of salt.
or depending on who they are. a working man would always follow crosswalks while a child would be more open to jaywalking. the only thing that needs to change is the values of the pathfinding squares
This idea doesn't work with flow fields. All decisions are pre-baked into the field, there's no way to have a random decision to ignore or change it. You would need another pre-generated field for each and every time you wanted an NPC to make a different decision than the regular one.
4:37 you could make different NPCs have different costs for walking over tiles. So one npc could be a chaotic maniac jumping over any obstacles, running through the roads while others are behaving normally.
I like the art style of the characters and think you're an amazing artist and creative genius! My personal take is that it's the designs that don't match, not the style. Since the game is so wacky and vibrant and fun I think the characters should match that by being a bunch of crazy aliens/ animals/ wizards/ whatever- just something as colourful as the rest of the game so far! (I can't WAIT for this game to come out!!!)
I agree! I think the portraits from Chef RPG are fairly similar in style but match better because of the funky character design so maybe more in that direction?
for the portraits, really the only idea I have in terms of making them fit more is to make the resolution slightly lower, as currently they basically have the same detail than some older games could fit on an entire screen, half might be too much of a cut, so cuttin it to just 3/4th or 2/3rd resolution might be a sweetspot? experiment around I guess!
Welp ,he's going back to his coffin to finish his game ... at least we know he's semi alive unlike other game devs ...*COUGH COUGH* *DANI* *COUGH COUGH*
An interesting thing you could do is have the tile costs change per-character (or per a type of character if that's too costly). So rebellious teens would be jaywalking, jumping fences and swimming, while older folk would be using sidewalks only. Edit: Someone else pointed out that this can be creature-dependent, so frogs would be more likely to cross water. That can add a lot of personality!
The portrait faces have very similar proportions in terms of lips, eyes, noses, ears and makes many of the faces look super similar. Going in and manually resizing the nose, eyes, ears, etc with the lasso tool during the early drafting would probably help with practicing that and/or finding a good variety of references of unfiltered human faces. I really like the use of solid black line art in first new portrait, it really helps the character pop from the background plus it matches the black outline the in-game charters have so it looks similar without sacrificing realism, the other characters blend with the background of their portraits without it. I hope these are tips that will work with your natural drawing style, I find it obnoxious when people give me critique that's essentially "draw completely different from the way you normally draw". Your style looks quite nice and reminds me of the way many older games would style character portraits, which is pretty cool imo. Edit: Perlin Noise
yeah the 'attractive woman from google' character designs can be Really rough for clarity esp for people with face blindness [if you told me it were the same person in different colors id believe you bc i have it] its probably better to pick more different reference materials for your characters to avoid that issue
Just yesterday I was remembering about Critter Crosser for some reason, and now a new video! I was skeptical about wishful thinking before, but seems that it works
the slightly more cartoonish style lands really well! you should try playing around with different face shapes and facial features, to make the portraits and characters stand out from each other more.
Looks great! The pixel art of your characters is super cute. Flow fields are super cool technology. Quite overshadowed by A* in gamedev, so it's cool to see it here!
Away from the portraits i would love to comment that the persistent NPCs are amazing. The flow field programming section really got me excited to try something similar, and making them leave small indicators of where they’ve been around is genius. Also, this video is hilarious in just the right places, and i love the editing style.
If your development update videos are this fun to watch, I can only imagine how much fun the game will be to play lol. Had the game wishlisted for quite some time, so glad it isn't likely to fade into obscurity!
I honestly already love this game, the fact that I can literally just watch how it is made and how it works just makes me like it more, feels like one of those games that's not too fancy or dramatic but one you will remember for a long time.
I'm kind of a control freak, so I made my own art program. It's nothing special, but you can try it if you want. If you google "MrPaint gamemaker" it should be the first result from the gamemaker forum. It's about a 2 megabytes download, but windows usually flags it as a virus. (It's not though,) Since I made it for myself, it fits my workflow perfectly and I use it for 99% of my pixel art.
One thing you could definitely add to the map is maybe certain areas being locked away, unless you have a creature with a certain ability! Such as needing an critter that can swim (or has a parent that could swim) being able to traverse a rapid river or dive into an underwater cavern/city :D
I think the new portraits are an improvement, but I would maybe narrow the colour palettes a little to make them higher contrast like the rest of the game. Someone else mentioned that the not-quite finished version of the portrait at ~5:58 as being pretty close to what would suit the overall style better, and I agree. Fewer colours, and maybe brighter colours. They can look like adults but also be colourful and/or quirky! Like Spike from Cowboy Beebop.
I watch all of your videos with my girlfriend. Reason being: I appreciate all games, no matter the art style or poly-count, meanwhile she distinctly likes "cozy" games with a similar aesthetic to yours (big Stardew Valley fan). We are both going to wishlist your game (we didn't even know we could do that THIS early, so we never checked on Steam). The way you describe problems you encounter, and the solutions you come up with, are very interesting and entertaining. We can't wait to see the final results!
Absolutely love your style of pixel art for portraits! Commenting to get more engagement on this vid Also those new trees look very similar to Stardew. Personally I prefer the blocky ones over them
My favorite example of lively cities in an indie game is Wuppo. Even though it's a metroidvania with combat mechanics, it focuses on populated areas where hanging out and doing things just for the sake of experiencing them is a major theme, with NPCs doing those same things along with you, and even the areas that aren't friendly towns will have some neutral or hostile NPCs going about their business
I've been following your progress since your first video, I don't even remember how I found it, but I've stayed ever since. Your portraits are intricate, I personally feel they kind of don't match the game still but they *are* appealing to look at. Gives me a nostalgic feeling.
Your approach on character design/style has not gone unnoticed and is greatly enjoyed. I can’t exactly put words into it (this is terribly helpful I know) but I feel it’s almost there in caching the right look for your game.
So good to see a new vid. You're organic render vid actually got me into SDF's and made me pay attention in uni for once. Love to see your great world design work too, they were just casually in the bg of you're older vids.
I love everything about this game except your push against the cartoony portraits. Personally I really think that's the only thing that would properly fit in with the art style of the rest of the game. Again though, everything else is looking fantastic!
I agree. With how exaggerated and cartoony the sprites are, the portraits just look so jarring. There's nothing bad with either of these styles, but expecting them to mesh without it being surprising is gonna be a hard path to take.
His portraits are waaaay too realistic. He also doesn't need to go full anime. Adults can exist, look like grown adults, and still hold tons of stylization. Look at stardew valley's portaits for example, they don't look like kids at all. Like it's not bad, but it's super jarring and the colors are way off for the type of game hes making
@@ultimaxkom8728 A preference that potentially game ruining if I'm being honest. A game like this desperately needs quirky and colorful characters, so not including caricatured characters is just shooting yourself in the foot.
not only are you making an awesome game you invest a ton of time to make these videos pedagogic and fun to watch for dumdums like us Awesome work, keep it up !
Not only you explain everything in a way that casual audience (like myself) can understand or grasp what you are talking about but also your ideas and video style are just so fun! This is going to go far man keep it up!
I’m always so excited to see updates on this game, I think procedural generation and animation are critically underutilized in games. Also, a few things about this update 1. I greatly appreciate you adding daily routines for NPCs along with things they can do, little detail like this go a long way in video games 2. I know you said you don’t like cartoony styles much, but as it stands, the current portraits don’t fit the NPCs at all. You might just have to resort making the character portraits more cartoonish to fit the style of the game. At the same time however, the sheer whiplash of interacting with a tiny little pixelated NPC and seeing a beautifully rendered, realistic character portrait pop up is incredibly hilarious, and I kinda love that.
I always love seeing another video from you, I have super high hopes for your game!! My only critique atm is that I think the pixel art for the human portraits is still too detailed for the style of the game
I'll be honest, I tend to prefer stylistics styles way more than more grounded styles, so I don't really like either portrait style. But even regardless of that, I feel on an objective (for lack of a better word) level, I still feel like it's clashes. I feel if you're dead set on a more grounded style, then you might need to just bite the bullet and make the overworld sprite spaceless. Though that may make them clash with the critters, who's overall sprites probably need A face in order to look good. I don't envy your position right now. But my taste don't align enough with yours to give anything helpful unfortunately. Maybe make it even more comic-like?
The in-world NPC designs look good, especially with the extra attitude! You should take a look at Starbound- very similar style, artistically, so it might be some good inspiration!
Your videos are genuinely so good and interesting. You cover things nice and quickly but with enough information to let us know what it does and some of how it works without getting too technical. Also, the game looks amazing and the new portraits in my opinion match a lot more and look amazing too!
I think the character portraits is an interesting art problem without a good answer. Like you said it can be difficult to take cartoonish adult designs seriously, however that might just be the intended affect of the characters design. It could be helpful to consider what kind of story you wish to tell with these characters before settling on a style for the portrait. Since the portrait is how we better relate and understand these characters it could help to consider what you want to relate to the audience with the characters first. The level of exaggeration allotted with a more cartoonish style allows for more obvious characterization while realistic is inherently more subtle. So deciding on a style before knowing the characters might be putting the horse before the cart. You're viewers, me included, are all going to want a more cartoonish style because it matches the expected aesthetic but I honestly trust whatever vision you have for the character portraits, I would just take a step back and consider what kind of characters do you need to capture in a portrait and what style is best used to display them.
You punished 'jaywalking' in the pathfinding algorithm? Fantasy world, but still American-pilled. Poor critters. 4:39 I would absolutely take the orange path.
I was JUST thinking about this game today, omg!! glad to see you're still working on it, love how it's looking so far, especially the part about character movement schedules by just, writing a text file! Also extremely enjoy the busytown reference and the little actions that npcs do, just seeing people actually /doing/ things aside from standing and walking around is refreshing. The little chalk drawings critter brings me extreme joy
The people art is still too realistic, looks cringey since they're all supermodels so it just feels like a horney dev that has to shoehorn attractive women into their game. I'd go for something closer to stardew valley's characters.
I'm not a fan of the portraits at all. Especially not the realistic style that you chose. I honestly think that for this game's style cartoony fits farrrr more, or personally I'd prefer no portraits at all.
I'm waiting so hard to give you my money and support. I can really tell you're going the extra mile to do everything in what you see is the best, efficient way possible and it's amazing the way you're documenting this entire process for everyone. Thank you
The portraits almost look AI-generated, I think it's because of the completely dissonant and uncontextualized realistic artstyle, color palette and vibe. Also doesn't help that all of your portraits are the most generic-looking conventionally attractive white women to ever exist but I guess that's just your thing.
the excitement i have for the eventual release of this game is obviously immense, but this is the first time i've been so hyped to just sit down and listen to a dev explaining how they're making their game. these videos are so fun, so well-edited, and while obviously it's not feasible for all devs to do this kind of thing this is the best example i know of how to keep people happy and engaged while waiting for a game to be finished
Umm... I don't know how to say this without it coming off mean... The portrait style you're going for feels very... NSFW gamey... They just REALLY don't fit the vibe.
WAKE UP BABE NEW CRITTER CROSSER DEV UPDATE DROPPED
I have babe ! And tis great !
I honestly forget critter crosser exists until the update drops and now it will be all that's on my mind for a solid 2 weeks again.
Repeat the cycle
Does this never get old? Under every video someone posts this..
@@carlstein9278 It's because every single video deserves it
Why is everyone’s babe is always sleeping? Get that checked.
generational talent
Fr
A prodigy of our time !
This was the last place I was expecting to see you
My god why is mister Minecraft child labor doing here
I think all frog NPCs should purposefully walk through the water, that's a feature opportunity
Custom tile costs per character could in theory be a pain to implement depending on how the current system is set up though.
@@zj9583
Perhaps each tile could have a 'type' assigned to it, and then certain npcs just have code that says if tile is 'type,' cost is lower?
I fear you would end up with multiple flow sheets.
Doable, absolutely
Worth it? Almost only if youve got substantial reason to do it
Like another village with frog culture where it isn't frowned upon to swim etc --> wet frlg infrastructure exists--> lore dictates even raccoon might swim --> we dont need to load both flow sheets and were done
Or a simple fix: give frog NPCs clothes. They wouldn't want to get their clothes wet, would they? :P
also, pixel portrait advice (from a graphic designer used to keeping things stylistically consistent):
The new versions are beautiful, but are very different in tone from the rest of the game. When I look at the portraits alone, I'm getting "realistic and serious visual novel". The high level of detail, realistic color palettes using many neutral colors (beige, navy, brown, etc), and realistic anatomy/proportions and expression are all communicating that they're very grounded in reality.
Everything else in the game is very stylized and /not/ grounded in reality. The grass is lime neon green, the world is full of silly little monsters with cartoonish proportions, the level of detail is very low and abstracted, and the color palettes are bright, saturated, and not too complex.
advice:
- When exploring to find a stylistic direction to go in, it's much more helpful to draw a lot of WILDLY different things at first, then analyze what were the best and worst options, and WHY they're the best and worst. Then draw some that aren't super different from your best options, and analyze those. Then draw some that only have minor changes from your best options on the last round.
- It's also best to work roughly and quickly to do more tests and get more information faster, leaving polished work to the later rounds. What could you do to explore stylistic direction quickly? Get some screenshots of critter crosser where you WOULD put a talksprite, take them in photoshop, go on google images, and start dragging and dropping portraits of people over the background of your world and see who looks at home there. Try WILDLY different styles. Try real photos with the kuwahara filter. Try some of the most tolerable caricature style art you can find. Try some edward mucha art nouveau illustrations. Try black and white portraits of people with the most interesting faces you can find. What about childrens book illustrations of adult characters? What happens if you scrunch them all down into a blocky compressed "pixel art" and tweak the color palette? Seeing what works best/worst and asking /why/ will give you a LOT more information and a solid direction to aim for when doing the actual pixel art.
- color pick your palette for the portraits directly from the current game assets. Add new colors to it as needed for skin/clothes/etc. Really try to keep it constrained to only a few useful colors, and make sure new colors look nice next to the old ones.
- keep reference screenshots of the current game in the background as a reminder of what kind of world these characters would inhabit. What kind of characters would the people playing your game expect to live there?
- Use a larger less detailed pixel grid that more closely matches the level of detail you have on the background assets.
also, please keep those previous pixel portraits in an easily findable folder and roll them into the next game or sell them as game assets, they're gorgeous and you should def use them in the future, just not for this game :) Hope that's helpful, good luck and I look forward to seeing what you do next devlog!
Stellar advice and critique 👍
the portraits look like pixelated photos. I think simplifying them while keeping the facial and body proportions might fit better with the games style and stop them from looking childish
Yeah, like I think something Stardew Valley-esque would fit perfectly.
@@drakesword5214 +1, the NPCs just need to have some odd "irregularities" to it, as actual human people do. Like this one NPC is handsome AF but they have an unusual nose, or this other one has their eyes a bit further away from each other than the rest of them. You know, like actual humans heh
@@drakesword5214 I think there's probably a middle-ground between Stardew Valley and something more realistic that he seems to want.
He should look towards Japanese games. Anime has always had a good blend between realism and cartoonish designs and while I don't necessarily think he should try to recreate an anime style for his characters (that wouldn't look good or fit his game), there are probably some tips he could take from there that would help.
Maybe just aiming for a Stardew Valley art style for portraits and then stylizing it less (or more in his own tastes) would be the solution, but I don't know. I'm not an artist, myself.
Absolutely.
There's a middle-ground between childish and realistic. Hands down a realistic aesthetic will always clash with the rest of the aesthetic of the game, I think he has to come to terms with that. Chef RPG or Stardew are places I think he should look to for inspiration on how to make stylized characters in that vein.
I think the more realistic art style is interesting, tho I feel like it can get boring very quickly when the designs all look very similar. I would suggest playing a lot with facial features to make them all look very distinct.
Yeah i agree, they look kinda similar
Something closer to Stardew Valley perhaps.
yeah definitely, visual distinction will really help keep players longer. for me is the npcs all look to similar i find it harder to remember their story
The portraits are WAY too sweaty, like its a game about monster hybrids but the portraits are supermodels with huge tits lol
What about mostly realistic but with like a small % stylization, usually in the eyes. Something maybe like a pixel version of the characters from Mouthwashing? The current raster you showed off kinda looks like the same base girl with different hair and clothing.
All good changes. Personally, I think having the portraits be even more cartoonish would be even better, though the current ones are probably fine
I agree - there's still a sort of seriousness in these portraits that's really not visually represented elsewhere in the game. AKA critters are cute and funny looking
@@forrestseabk i was about to comment that
Agreed, cartoony portraits fit the art style much better, the realistic ones look too much like he used AI to generate a picture of an attractive woman, then threw it into a photoshop pixel filter.
i want serious portraits for humans and super funky ones for animals or objects
Shut up, no one cares what you think, the realistic portraits are awesome.
First thing's first. I absolute adore the game you are making, and wish nothing more than it becomes a wonderful thing that many can enjoy; chiefly you :)
I like the new character portraits. If I was forced to nit pick, I think the reason character portraits kind of stand out so much is the palette complexity. Your in world npcs are very simple in their palettes, often having 3-5 maybe 9 colors at most. While the portraits are vastly more complexed with hundreds of colors at the least. Again I do like the new portraits, but if I had to pick out why they stand out so much I'd say this.
Yeah, I like the half-colored-in version of the girl at 5:57 almost more than the fully-colored-in version
Yeah, this is exactly it with the portraits
Yeah totally! Realistic proportions are great but the color difference really makes it feel mismatched
great point, the half-colored version does look better. maybe add a few shading.
Damn you're right the cel shading look makes it pop
The portraits feel like they are for an entirely different game. They’re not bad, just jarring when put with the rest of the game’s art style
agreed
nah you're addicted to hentai pal
Exactly! the critters are not that detailed too, probably it's best to go with a simplified design
the portraits look honestly stunning but i agree that they're a little jarring. I wonder if having a portrait at all is necessary. someone else brought up the idea of stardew valley-esque portraits but I personally think having no portrait at all would work fine (like Terraria?). I guess this would mean the sprites of the characters would have to be more individualised so that each npc still can be told apart.
This is gonna sound harsh and kinda cruel but the portraits look a bit like they're AI generated. They're of course not actually AI generated, we see the WIPs in the video, but they have a lot of the same problems that AI generated art has.
Like an AI generated image, I cannot tell what the intent behind the image is. The characters are sort of generically pretty and quarter stylized, three quarters realistic, but I could not tell you anything about what sort of person the characters depicted in those portraits are supposed to be. And sure they're probably just supposed to be generic NPCs, but you can make someone look generic in a way that feels intentional, but these designs feel accidentally generic.
The little frog guy playing fetch with their dog is so cool
3:58 i think itd be fun if some npcs have a chance to favour expensive tiles on occassion, jaywalking, desire paths, tripping over bushes, getting agitated if someone in front of them walks too slowly
like preferring to walk on the road, grass, etc?
Or critters not caring if they run on grass, while humans prefer sidewalks. Or amphibians not caring about wet tiles unlike other critters.
@@Fannerable This could potentially also get used to classify movement for your creatures too, though I'm not the visionary so my opinion comes with a free grain of salt.
or depending on who they are. a working man would always follow crosswalks while a child would be more open to jaywalking. the only thing that needs to change is the values of the pathfinding squares
This idea doesn't work with flow fields. All decisions are pre-baked into the field, there's no way to have a random decision to ignore or change it. You would need another pre-generated field for each and every time you wanted an NPC to make a different decision than the regular one.
4:37 you could make different NPCs have different costs for walking over tiles. So one npc could be a chaotic maniac jumping over any obstacles, running through the roads while others are behaving normally.
I like the art style of the characters and think you're an amazing artist and creative genius! My personal take is that it's the designs that don't match, not the style. Since the game is so wacky and vibrant and fun I think the characters should match that by being a bunch of crazy aliens/ animals/ wizards/ whatever- just something as colourful as the rest of the game so far! (I can't WAIT for this game to come out!!!)
I agree! I think the portraits from Chef RPG are fairly similar in style but match better because of the funky character design so maybe more in that direction?
that sounds sweet
for the portraits, really the only idea I have in terms of making them fit more is to make the resolution slightly lower, as currently they basically have the same detail than some older games could fit on an entire screen, half might be too much of a cut, so cuttin it to just 3/4th or 2/3rd resolution might be a sweetspot? experiment around I guess!
He's alive !!!!!!
And so is his game world
Welp ,he's going back to his coffin to finish his game ... at least we know he's semi alive unlike other game devs ...*COUGH COUGH* *DANI* *COUGH COUGH*
An interesting thing you could do is have the tile costs change per-character (or per a type of character if that's too costly). So rebellious teens would be jaywalking, jumping fences and swimming, while older folk would be using sidewalks only.
Edit: Someone else pointed out that this can be creature-dependent, so frogs would be more likely to cross water. That can add a lot of personality!
The open world design of your game is very unique. I can't find words to describe it but it gives pretty nice vibes.
Reminds me of the megaman battle network GBA art style. And I adore it.
Honestly that mechanic, and how he seems to know how to get it to work the way he wants, is what got me to wishlist this. It sounds really cool!
I know! I think this feels especially true about the bushes
The portrait faces have very similar proportions in terms of lips, eyes, noses, ears and makes many of the faces look super similar. Going in and manually resizing the nose, eyes, ears, etc with the lasso tool during the early drafting would probably help with practicing that and/or finding a good variety of references of unfiltered human faces. I really like the use of solid black line art in first new portrait, it really helps the character pop from the background plus it matches the black outline the in-game charters have so it looks similar without sacrificing realism, the other characters blend with the background of their portraits without it. I hope these are tips that will work with your natural drawing style, I find it obnoxious when people give me critique that's essentially "draw completely different from the way you normally draw". Your style looks quite nice and reminds me of the way many older games would style character portraits, which is pretty cool imo.
Edit: Perlin Noise
yeah the 'attractive woman from google' character designs can be Really rough for clarity esp for people with face blindness [if you told me it were the same person in different colors id believe you bc i have it] its probably better to pick more different reference materials for your characters to avoid that issue
Just yesterday I was remembering about Critter Crosser for some reason, and now a new video!
I was skeptical about wishful thinking before, but seems that it works
Thank you for your metaphysical service
the slightly more cartoonish style lands really well! you should try playing around with different face shapes and facial features, to make the portraits and characters stand out from each other more.
Looks great! The pixel art of your characters is super cute. Flow fields are super cool technology. Quite overshadowed by A* in gamedev, so it's cool to see it here!
Away from the portraits i would love to comment that the persistent NPCs are amazing. The flow field programming section really got me excited to try something similar, and making them leave small indicators of where they’ve been around is genius. Also, this video is hilarious in just the right places, and i love the editing style.
If your development update videos are this fun to watch, I can only imagine how much fun the game will be to play lol. Had the game wishlisted for quite some time, so glad it isn't likely to fade into obscurity!
Really insightful. I added Critter Crosser to my wishlist, because the concept itself looks interesting as well!
I think the art looks really good, but the style of the game really does give off a more cartoony feel rather than semi-realistic
The new style of portraits seems excellent. Well done!
this is one of those rare games, that where you simple cant not see all the ambition and charm poured into it. this man has the og dev mindset
also, i wish i could wishlist this game twice
I'm so obsessed with this project, every time a new video comes out i watch the entire series and then i watch the new video a few times
I honestly already love this game, the fact that I can literally just watch how it is made and how it works just makes me like it more, feels like one of those games that's not too fancy or dramatic but one you will remember for a long time.
Really rad stuff dude, just wishlisted the game. Keep going, you got this!
1:17 Unexpected Gothic 2 music. Fitting for the segment about NPC schedules
WISHLISTED! KEEP GOING!!!! It looks sooooooo good!
wait hold up, what is that program that looks like MSPaint but seems to have modern features, at 0:11?
I'm kind of a control freak, so I made my own art program. It's nothing special, but you can try it if you want. If you google "MrPaint gamemaker" it should be the first result from the gamemaker forum. It's about a 2 megabytes download, but windows usually flags it as a virus. (It's not though,) Since I made it for myself, it fits my workflow perfectly and I use it for 99% of my pixel art.
Also interested to know, seems neat.
@@RujiKtheComatosebro made an entire paint app 😭 my kind of procrastination
One thing you could definitely add to the map is maybe certain areas being locked away, unless you have a creature with a certain ability!
Such as needing an critter that can swim (or has a parent that could swim) being able to traverse a rapid river or dive into an underwater cavern/city :D
It's been 84 years...
Jokes aside im super happy you're back with more lovely stuff.
I am so glad you uploaded again!!
Holy shit this day couldn’t get any better!
I just finished watching all the dev logs! This game is looking very good! I have wish listed it. I look Forward to Playing!
I think the new portraits are an improvement, but I would maybe narrow the colour palettes a little to make them higher contrast like the rest of the game. Someone else mentioned that the not-quite finished version of the portrait at ~5:58 as being pretty close to what would suit the overall style better, and I agree. Fewer colours, and maybe brighter colours. They can look like adults but also be colourful and/or quirky! Like Spike from Cowboy Beebop.
I watch all of your videos with my girlfriend. Reason being: I appreciate all games, no matter the art style or poly-count, meanwhile she distinctly likes "cozy" games with a similar aesthetic to yours (big Stardew Valley fan).
We are both going to wishlist your game (we didn't even know we could do that THIS early, so we never checked on Steam).
The way you describe problems you encounter, and the solutions you come up with, are very interesting and entertaining.
We can't wait to see the final results!
Absolutely love your style of pixel art for portraits! Commenting to get more engagement on this vid
Also those new trees look very similar to Stardew. Personally I prefer the blocky ones over them
My favorite example of lively cities in an indie game is Wuppo. Even though it's a metroidvania with combat mechanics, it focuses on populated areas where hanging out and doing things just for the sake of experiencing them is a major theme, with NPCs doing those same things along with you, and even the areas that aren't friendly towns will have some neutral or hostile NPCs going about their business
6:00 Rujik flexing his godly pixel art skills over us.
Thank you for considering modding from the get go! Always love it when dev does that.
I've been following your progress since your first video, I don't even remember how I found it, but I've stayed ever since.
Your portraits are intricate, I personally feel they kind of don't match the game still but they *are* appealing to look at. Gives me a nostalgic feeling.
I think the readable waypoint file is pretty neat too! Also kind the visuals when showing pathfinding! Good job and keep it up
This is such a beginner friendly video to explain pathfinding. It's excellent
WOOOOOH my favorite dev logs.
you are DOING the BEST in ALL no matter the time, YOU ARE PRECIOUS
Your approach on character design/style has not gone unnoticed and is greatly enjoyed.
I can’t exactly put words into it (this is terribly helpful I know) but I feel it’s almost there in caching the right look for your game.
So good to see a new vid. You're organic render vid actually got me into SDF's and made me pay attention in uni for once. Love to see your great world design work too, they were just casually in the bg of you're older vids.
The chalk drawings being left by npc's is a really nice touch
I love everything about this game except your push against the cartoony portraits. Personally I really think that's the only thing that would properly fit in with the art style of the rest of the game. Again though, everything else is looking fantastic!
I agree. With how exaggerated and cartoony the sprites are, the portraits just look so jarring. There's nothing bad with either of these styles, but expecting them to mesh without it being surprising is gonna be a hard path to take.
His portraits are waaaay too realistic. He also doesn't need to go full anime. Adults can exist, look like grown adults, and still hold tons of stylization. Look at stardew valley's portaits for example, they don't look like kids at all. Like it's not bad, but it's super jarring and the colors are way off for the type of game hes making
Less a push against and more of it simply being his personal pref. Well, my additive advice here is reducing its color palette to match the game more.
@@ultimaxkom8728 A preference that potentially game ruining if I'm being honest. A game like this desperately needs quirky and colorful characters, so not including caricatured characters is just shooting yourself in the foot.
i like that he's doin his own style
not only are you making an awesome game you invest a ton of time to make these videos pedagogic and fun to watch for dumdums like us
Awesome work, keep it up !
I really love the art style! I hope even nonhuman NPCs get the same treatment. Something of a 'cute from afar, kinda weird looking up close' vibe.
Not only you explain everything in a way that casual audience (like myself) can understand or grasp what you are talking about but also your ideas and video style are just so fun!
This is going to go far man keep it up!
Neat to get an update on this, the realistic portraits are jarring. Do one for Mario
I love that both your game and devlog series are great.
I’m always so excited to see updates on this game, I think procedural generation and animation are critically underutilized in games.
Also, a few things about this update
1.
I greatly appreciate you adding daily routines for NPCs along with things they can do, little detail like this go a long way in video games
2.
I know you said you don’t like cartoony styles much, but as it stands, the current portraits don’t fit the NPCs at all. You might just have to resort making the character portraits more cartoonish to fit the style of the game. At the same time however, the sheer whiplash of interacting with a tiny little pixelated NPC and seeing a beautifully rendered, realistic character portrait pop up is incredibly hilarious, and I kinda love that.
Those portraits are gorgeous!
I literally cannot wait for this game
I thought the art looked familiar in the thumbnail! U have no idea how stoked about this game I am!
wishin u literally ALL of the success!
Im so happy you're still hard at work in the game
man i love your devlogs, they're sooo fun :p
the portrait style has gotta be cartoony in some way man its the only thing that fits
nice video, now we wait another year
I always love seeing another video from you, I have super high hopes for your game!! My only critique atm is that I think the pixel art for the human portraits is still too detailed for the style of the game
This is one of the things on my feed that when they pop up, I have to drop everything to watch. I can't wait to buy this game.
I'll be honest, I tend to prefer stylistics styles way more than more grounded styles, so I don't really like either portrait style. But even regardless of that, I feel on an objective (for lack of a better word) level, I still feel like it's clashes. I feel if you're dead set on a more grounded style, then you might need to just bite the bullet and make the overworld sprite spaceless. Though that may make them clash with the critters, who's overall sprites probably need A face in order to look good.
I don't envy your position right now. But my taste don't align enough with yours to give anything helpful unfortunately. Maybe make it even more comic-like?
RujiK woke up from a coma to drop a total banger, and I dropped everything to watch it! I love this channel.
I hope we get a vending machine room Easter egg
Love your work man, can't wait for this game
I think your character portraits would fit the style a lot better with fewer colors. Other than that, they look great!
you are creating art man, this is gorgeous!
YOOO NEW VID LETS GOO
this is the greatest channel ever wtf love the editing style and vibe, great vid
The pixel art characters look a little too perfect in my opinion
I cant believe its been four years already yet not a single week go by when i think about your project. Never change your humor man
I'm crying rn everything you make is just so peak
gorgeous design, inspired premise. i need this to be a thing
Yesssssssss!!
The in-world NPC designs look good, especially with the extra attitude! You should take a look at Starbound- very similar style, artistically, so it might be some good inspiration!
yooo you remembered your password! lets goo!
Your videos are genuinely so good and interesting. You cover things nice and quickly but with enough information to let us know what it does and some of how it works without getting too technical. Also, the game looks amazing and the new portraits in my opinion match a lot more and look amazing too!
No way new vid
I love the Seyda Neen shout out. I compare all intro areas to it.
I think the character portraits is an interesting art problem without a good answer. Like you said it can be difficult to take cartoonish adult designs seriously, however that might just be the intended affect of the characters design. It could be helpful to consider what kind of story you wish to tell with these characters before settling on a style for the portrait. Since the portrait is how we better relate and understand these characters it could help to consider what you want to relate to the audience with the characters first.
The level of exaggeration allotted with a more cartoonish style allows for more obvious characterization while realistic is inherently more subtle. So deciding on a style before knowing the characters might be putting the horse before the cart. You're viewers, me included, are all going to want a more cartoonish style because it matches the expected aesthetic but I honestly trust whatever vision you have for the character portraits, I would just take a step back and consider what kind of characters do you need to capture in a portrait and what style is best used to display them.
very excited for this game. cant wait to play it on my channel!
You punished 'jaywalking' in the pathfinding algorithm?
Fantasy world, but still American-pilled. Poor critters.
4:39 I would absolutely take the orange path.
I was JUST thinking about this game today, omg!! glad to see you're still working on it, love how it's looking so far, especially the part about character movement schedules by just, writing a text file! Also extremely enjoy the busytown reference and the little actions that npcs do, just seeing people actually /doing/ things aside from standing and walking around is refreshing. The little chalk drawings critter brings me extreme joy
What's the song at 3:20?
Unplugged. From the contraptions game
just binge watched all devlogs this morning hoping for a new one, best timing ever
The people art is still too realistic, looks cringey since they're all supermodels so it just feels like a horney dev that has to shoehorn attractive women into their game. I'd go for something closer to stardew valley's characters.
This looks really neat! I love how you explain your processes, it's fascinating! *wishlisted*
I'm not a fan of the portraits at all. Especially not the realistic style that you chose. I honestly think that for this game's style cartoony fits farrrr more, or personally I'd prefer no portraits at all.
I'm waiting so hard to give you my money and support. I can really tell you're going the extra mile to do everything in what you see is the best, efficient way possible and it's amazing the way you're documenting this entire process for everyone. Thank you
The portraits almost look AI-generated, I think it's because of the completely dissonant and uncontextualized realistic artstyle, color palette and vibe.
Also doesn't help that all of your portraits are the most generic-looking conventionally attractive white women to ever exist but I guess that's just your thing.
the excitement i have for the eventual release of this game is obviously immense, but this is the first time i've been so hyped to just sit down and listen to a dev explaining how they're making their game. these videos are so fun, so well-edited, and while obviously it's not feasible for all devs to do this kind of thing this is the best example i know of how to keep people happy and engaged while waiting for a game to be finished
Umm... I don't know how to say this without it coming off mean... The portrait style you're going for feels very... NSFW gamey...
They just REALLY don't fit the vibe.
Besides the awesome game in the works it's really amazing to hear your reasoning and techniques! Great display of intelligence