Getting a Facelift
Originally published January 1st, 2020
The visuals of Impressions have improved.
War Ender Store Links:
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/884070/War_Ender/
Itch.io: https://prof-smash.itch.io/war-ender
GameJolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/war-ender/355809
Happy new year! Now, what's this? The game's changed its look! Yes, the placeholder art has been removed in favor of getting, you know, actual art. While the transition is still going on, I wanted to at least show off what all has changed in the visual landscape of Impressions. There's a lot to go over, from backgrounds to characters to UI, so let's not dilly dally. Let's begin by looking at the background.
A lot of the assets from the background are largely the same as before but with some improvements made. For instance, the floor has been given a tile pattern to make it less boring to look at. The table the characters are all seated at has been given a few improvements. It now looks like a glass table with a wooden frame, and the planet in the center has been touched up to look more like, well, a planet. There's even a faint light coming from the planet. As for the wall, this part of the main room has seen few real changes. Many of the assets are the same, right down to the blue wall and the screens in the background. The plan is to have something display in those screens later. However, Stream 47A has been given a better logo and the “topic banner” now looks a little better.
The most obvious change comes in the characters themselves. No longer do they look like strange creatures with misshapen eyes and performing a sort of T-pose. Instead they look positively more human. I'm trying to communicate as much of their personality through their appearance as possible. The expressions the characters will make will of course help with that, but I want a player to look at the characters and be able to easily guess where they fall on the issue of aliens coming to the planet.
You may also notice that a couple new avatar options are made available now. I said before that I wanted to make the game so that you can easily put yourself into the world. At some point I thought that was going to be a little harder for those with a different skin color, so I made some additional appearance options to accommodate more players. It's my hope that a player will look at the appearances available to them and resonate with one of them in some way. After all, it's a lot easier to get invested in a world when you're the one in it. Immersion is going to be pretty important for Impressions, so the game needs options to better increase the chances of a player getting immersed.
Finally, let's talk about the UI. You may have noticed throughout development and indeed in these very images that blue is a prominent color in this world. But there's a second color that will be heavily used in the visual landscape of Impressions. That color is purple, as you no doubt asserted from the image above. A lot of the purple in this game will appear in the game's UI elements, with some splotches of purple appearing in outside the UI such as in Patricia's tie and hair. Unfortunately, due to some bugs I have yet to fix I'm unable to really show off how this UI looks when making decisions in game. I know that might sound weird. How does including new assets mess something up? You'd be surprised at the number of ways a game can break. Right now one major issue is the player is being tripled in size as the game starts up due to Impressions not yet having the information needed on what to do with the new player image. Rest assured, this should all be fixed relatively quickly.
So, what all is left in the development of Impressions? I said I was 90% done, right? That is correct. I'm still getting some art assets together at this time. I have most of them, but there's a few that are still missing. Most notable are some social media icons that will accommodate a certain section of the game. I have about 15 made, but I wouldn't be surprised if I wind up making about 100 before development is done. You can see some favorite icons of mine in the image below. There's also a few random assets that are still needed for more trivial things. One of the big tasks remaining is to create a proper, nice looking title screen. It's still just an empty void with some buttons in it. We need something with a little more atmosphere. I'll also do something similar to the game's end scene, though that won't need quite as much. In the meantime, enjoy some of my favorite in-game social media icons created so far.
Oh, there’s placeholder art man! Guess he’s still in the game after all. Anyway, as much as I'd love to drop a release date while I'm at it, I should probably refrain from doing so. I've decided that I'll make a random dev blog when I have a release date ready to go. That could drop next week, or it could be two months from now. Such is the nature of the game development beast. It's full of surprises and you never know what exactly is going to happen. But I can say that I think it's getting so close I can practically taste it. And on top of Impressions there's plenty of other things I know I have to look forward to in the new year. Should be all kinds of fun!
Until next time!
-Lance T.
War Ender Store Links:
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/884070/War_Ender/
Itch.io: https://prof-smash.itch.io/war-ender
GameJolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/war-ender/355809