Retro-Cruch-Cyber-JRPG

Battle Loop Prototype – 00

 It gets real dark real early here in the PNW, which, combined with the constant rain, makes the winter a great time to start a new project. This year I thought I would go back to my roots.

Goals: 

Refresh my C# and do a limited crash course in Unity.

Find a way to use quickly sketched out characters in-game.

Make a compelling case for bringing back an old-school jrpg turn-based system.

See if I still had what it takes after six years away from game development.

The first rpg I ever played was Final Fantasy Legend II for the Game Boy. I’ve always loved it. This project is a bit of a love letter to that old-style, turn-based, text-driven battle system. 

As a concept artist, I tend to have a preference for the early exploratory works of development over the polished stuff that tends to make into the shipped games. So I wanted to leverage the quick black and white work I do and see if I could make viable assets out of it.

There are elements of the UI that are still pretty ‘blocked in’ but, that kind of polish comes with time. The actual battle system works pretty well. Status effects and edge-case scenarios are stubbed in at the moment, but the core is solid and ready to be expanded. Battle order, damage, chance-to-hit, are all based on various stats on characters or the actions they chose.

The enemy and large portraits are all animated using Live2D Cubism. You cut up your drawing in photoshop, and animate the individual elements. I’m thrilled with the tool and its Unity integration. I can go from illustration – to cut up model- then animate a fairly complex idle sequence and get it in-game in about 3 hours. 

A lot of the glowy effects are off-the-shelf shaders I purchased from the unity store, as well as some of the ‘retro’ style post fx I have going. I’m rather fond of the Retro-Tech-Crunch feel that I managed to pull off. The ‘flash/pop’ effects are frame-by-frame animations done in Adobe Animate. 

That pretty much covers it for now. I hope this inspires someone somewhere. I’m going to keep plugging away at this thing. Maybe someday I’ll have a complete game I can share. Until then, I think of it as a bizarre way to display my personal art. 

Golden Fox, Slots Prototype project.

I find the vast majority of Slot Machines obnoxious.  I never understood how the makers expected folks to sit down and stare at them for long periods of time when the majority were headache-inducing. So, one winter I decided to make my own. For various reasons, I never did anything with it, but I still stand by the idea that the whole slot machine genre could be better. It was also a good project to refresh my After Effects and Zbrush skills.

Arcana’s Defender – published on iOS, Android, and Web in 2012