Hi everyone! It’s time for a new update. Like we’ve discussed in the latest entries of this devlog, everybody at the studio is pretty busy right now, but it’s the quiet kind of work. We’re either doing things that we can’t spoil or tiny tasks that aren’t that fun to talk about. Like pondering the costs (in terms of both time and money) of doing each port and figuring out the details of the release (which is an extensive and tricky thing).

We’re also taking care of some tasks that had a low priority, like polishing the walking animations of every character in the game. After all, you don’t really need that to move on and there are more pressing things to implement, like interfaces or maps. You can even have characters floating around the city, it doesn’t have a big impact on testing and iterating. As we moved down on the huge list of things left to do, Rubén was able to spend some time working on this. We have prepared a couple of gifs to show the process of making these walking animations. A Place for the Unwilling is fully developed in 2D, meaning these animations have to be repeated in every direction (and each of those has several frames). By now, you all know it’s a long way.

Each character has eight animated walking and standing animations. Oldschool isometric games had four, then eight became the standard. Having that number of animations isn’t necessarily tied to how they move in a game. You can have a character with just two animated directions moving around in 360º with total freedom. In A Place for the Unwilling, we started locking movement to eight possible options so it fully matched the moving animations. Later on, we tried a new thing and got rid of the restrictions so moving around didn’t feel as clunky. There were some times where we didn’t have an animation that looked good if the character was moving in a certain angle (plus we encountered some other minor issues), so we decided to experiment and had movement restricted to sixteen walking angles (still using our eight animations). This ended up being the one we stuck with as it made movement feel fine while still looking good on screen.

Getting back to the topic of today’s update, we got Myles and August, the anarchist newspaper boy from the poor quarter and the ruthless head of the police department. They are two of the most well-known characters from the cast and they have been around since we released the first images of the game. It’s easy to imagine they’re bound to bump into each other a few times, one being a boy who likes to go around causing trouble while the other can barely control himself when it comes to waving his nightstick.

And that’s all for today. We’ll see you soon with a new update. While that happens, why don’t you go ahead and join our Discord?