SECRET
DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB7005
Date 11/21/2021 08:03 PM
To: The People
From: Tanner Fry
Subject: Major Design Changes
Scale and Adding Depth
Quite a few drastic changes have taken place over the past month. Some of them would be considered toss ups while others leave that uneasy feeling inside. The biggest decision being the scale of the art in AIA. A lot of thought has gone into whether more detail is needed or if the current designs and artwork will suffice.
For instance, our first approach doesn't allow game objects and buildings to express their details or animations as well as high resolution images but does add depth to the buildings.
Low resolution AIA buildings.
Whereas the second approach does allow for the ability of detailed character animations, buildings, and possibilities of vehicles or other moving parts.
High resolution AIA building
High resolution agent run animation
The issue with the second approach is that the complexity of art that needs to be created, and the amount of time it takes for each art piece/animation, can drastically increase development time/cost beyond any realistic release date.
So, I'm torn. Lose detail but allow a realistic vision to come to fruition, or intensify the detail to allow greater range of development while tossing any deadline out the window. The struggles of a solo dev. That's why after a month of adding more detail and struggling to justify the time it takes, I've uno reversed this dumpster fire and gone back to my "8-bit" style pixel art.
Artistic depth has been added to the buildings and other objects within the game scene via simple methods and additions. See videos below for the transition:
Procedural Maps
Buzzword buzzword procedural generation buzzword... Good news! Both map creation and integration, from a developer POV, have become 100x easier. No more need to handcraft the sand lines, deep forests, or water because as of now AIA integrates procedural map generation through the use of the Perlin Noise algorithm.
An old algorithm but still very effective. Through this, map generation won't become stale and later map complexity/add-ons will allow for a more diverse experience.
Procedural map generation example
That's it for this dev blog. Have a good one and if you have any suggestions on certain topics that you'd like to know more about, then head on over to our forums and let us know. You can also email our support at Support@digimasteredworks.com.
Roadmap
Milestones To Do:
Milestones Completed:
SECRET
Approved for release: 11/21/21 ID: IB7005
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