Well it’s that time again to update you guys on Project Smallbot: Light!

To start things off I’ll be using my twitter more often to update you guys on the game as well. I’ll be posting pictures, sprites, and dev update announcements so if you haven’t yet then go and check out my Twitter account and follow for the latest mini updates and retweet to show your support.

Well with that out of the way we can get into the current progression. Since the last update, I say progression has gone a bit slower, but still smoothly. Since I’ve been working on preparing for college, working in general, and participating in a week long game jam, development has gotten slower. But now with the game jam out of the way I can say now that things should be getting back to usual speed again overtime for the remaining month of August. Even with the amount of time between update 3 and this current update, I still managed to refine and optimize a few code as well as work on the art for level 3.

So art wise, level 3 by far has to be the most experimental and harder levels I’ve worked on so far due to it’s size and setting. It doesn’t take place during the day like the other levels and the level is very wide and big, having both underground parts and areas in the high part of the level to explore. It was very time consuming to work on the foreground alone and even then it’s not final yet. But with that all said the level still looks great. The background is also a very difficult thing to make since it’s all grass, some mountains, but no trees. I wanted the level to look like an open plain with nothing but tall grass and far mountains in the distance. In the design doc I made 2 years ago I wrote how I wanted to give a beautiful setting that greatly differs from the dark setting level 2 gave off. A clear night sky with stars, and grass that can be seen as the player gets to higher ground. Even the lower part of the level has a lot more color. Overall in general I just wanted level 2 and level 3 to be greatly different from each other.

(Once again these screenshots do not reflect the final game.)

Fun fact about this level is that I once tried creating the background with pre-made assets as well, but I didn’t like the results.

I’ll post a video showing off the level in motion on my youtube channel sometime today or tomorrow. On my twitter, (if I could figure out how to create gifs) I’ll start showing off some sprite animations as well starting either this week or next week. But for now that’s all I have to show off for this update. Next update will probably show the completed version of this level along with a few other things.

Until Next Time!!!

:-)