Hello everyone!
It has already been more than three years since I released Shardpunk - my first commercial game ever. I want to again emphasise how much I appreciate each and every one of you who has supported me during my game development journey. All the feedback, reviews and discussions mean a lot to me.
In this entry I would like to showcase how the approach to Shardpunk character visuals was changing as the time passed.
When I started working with Kurt (the miracle pixel artist who created most of the stuff in Shardpunk), I knew what the general art direction for the game should be, and he nailed it perfectly.
These are the first concepts of the "katana pistol lady", who would then become the "katana shotgun lady", a.k.a Tilly Rexworth:
In the end we went with F, with little adjustments.
In order to save time and money, I've decided that the game will have pre-made characters instead of generated ones. So there would be a character who would be that girl in binoculars, wielding a gun and a katana. And another character would be a bald sniper. And a redhead medic girl. This effectively reduced the amount of work that had to be done - because the weapon visuals were literally attached to a certain character instead of being independent elements.
An early combat prototype. Tilly is holding a pistol, and she has the katana attack present.
Michael firing his pistol at an assault-rifle wielding rat.
When I started working on the sequel, I wanted to expand character development by allowing the player to pick from a far greater number of character skills - and this would include the ability to use different weapon types - and even switching them during combat. This required a different approach to how the characters and weapons are designed and displayed: they have now become separate objects.
The same character wielding a katana/sniper rifle, or a katana/assault rifle in Shardpunk 2.
The extra gain from having separate, rotatable weapons was the ability to nicely display weapon projectiles. This was a problem in first Shardpunk, as the characters were only aiming in eight directions and I felt that the projectiles were not ideally aligned in many cases, so I decided to drop it.
Shardpunk: no visible projectiles.
Shardpunk 2: projectiles!
Looking at these systems today, it’s clear how much the approach to character and weapon design naturally evolved between Shardpunk and Shardpunk 2. What is more, introducing rotatable weapons resonated pretty well with directional overwatch system, which I ended up adding to the sequel as well.
If you’d like to see where all of this is heading, you can already try the alpha playtest build of Shardpunk 2 - you can find more details here: