As the end of the year gets near, you know it’s a tradition to start making lists, lots and lots of lists. For some, it’s a way to look back into the year that’s about to end and see what has been accomplished. For others, it is a way to look back at the things they’ve missed and swear that next year will be the year. For others, it’s another chance to remember the good moments that passed, the joys that the year brought. And for others, it is a way to not having to think in a proper update. Of course, this is not our case.

These are bugs that (while they may have been annoying, difficult, easy or anything in between to fix) brought at least a smile to our faces when we saw them, made us look at the rest of the team and go “Hey! Look over here! This damn thing is broken again!”

So first we start with numero seis.

6. This is thriller, thriller mob

Once we found out that the mob would turn to face the wrong side while moving or not turn at all, as we can see here in an extreme case. At the time we had more pressing issues, so fixing this bug was a bit low in the queue and we ended up having a moonwalking mob with us. And someone would always start whistling Thriller while playtesting. That was the worst part, I think.

5. Oedipus summons an otherworldly horror

The horror! THE HORROR! It seems that time travel, cloning people, being the father of your brothers and sister… these kind of things aren’t without consequences for your sanity… and Oedipus knows this very well. At some point, he tried to escape this torment by splicing DNA from the people he cloned to create a vessel for a Great Old One to inhabit so it would wreck havoc on ancient Greece. Or maybe he just created copies of animated sprites that got stuck together at 0,0,0. I still think Oedipus is not to be trusted, but the guys will still use him in the game. Iä! Iä! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

4. Oedipus has gone too far…

This is a last minute addition to this list! It happened this morning, and both Sebastian and I agreed that it deserved this spot.  We were working on being able to replay a level with the same mob when we realized that crossing your own time line leads to unfortunate situations like that one. And Oedipus hadn’t said anything to us. Yet another reason not to trust him.

3. Apollo uses his Rapid Shot Feat

Ouch, that looks like it hurts. A lot. Poor philosopher. Now imagine you are testing, battling Apollo with your mob. Then you pause it for a moment to check some variables and stuff, to check if everything is behaving as expected. Then you go back to the game to move on to the next critical moment aaaaand… this welcomes you. A bunch of arrows shot rapidly by the god Apollo. It’s not fair, is it? Also, notice how they are arrows and not cats? Damn Roque.

2.Perseus goes Garry’s Mod all over Delphi. Or just slithers around. One of those.

Many are Perseus’ exploits, as we all know, but it seems griffons have a funny effect on him. When brave Perseus was attacked by one of the majestic beasts and later rescued by the rest of the mob, he never recovered from the experience. But he gained the ability to phase through buildings and stuff, so there’s that.

1. Hallelujah, it’s raining philosophers!

And this is the top of the list! The best one! The philosophers rain! Why the background is dark grey, you ask? Because this happened among a complicated series of things breaking one after the other, including the level not loading and the action phase getting stuck in “spawn player”. But seriously, I think this picture speaks by itself. So behold the best bug of the year!

And that’s it. There were more bugs, of course, but those were more of the “AAARGH!!!” kind and not memorable at all. I hope this list has made your life 780% percent better (±780).  Enjoy the upcoming holiday, celebrate responsibly and don’t aggravate Santa by throwing rocks at the reindeer.

Last week Roque wrote a little bit about heroes in Okhlos. Today I will keep on writing about them. Why? Because heroes are a key part of the game.  Getting the right heroes in your mob can make difference between drinking spiced wine over the ruins of mount Olympus and getting squashed like an insect under Zeus’ flip flops.  Not only that, heroes will make each mob different, will make you play in a different way, will let you build up different strategies. Heroes are everything.

There are several ways to get heroes.  As it had been said, some heroes may be found while exploring the levels and other through the hero market. Yet other heroes you will only find after defeating certain enemies: for example, you may be able to free a hero from the clutches of an evil monster and then add them to your mob.

Another things that makes heroes different from the rest of units is that heroes do not die.  They can be knocked out, yes, even the mighty Heracles can be sent out of combat by direct blow from Ares, but unlike regular people Heracles will rejoin the mob when you start the next level or when certain other conditions are met. So heroes are somewhat immortal but can still be temporarily disabled and leave the poor helpless leader alone at the mercy of an enraged cyclops.

There will be lots of heroes, so we divided them into five categories:

1) Super Units.  These heroes are an enhanced version of the regular unit types.  Hero warriors will be much stronger and hit harder than regular warriors, hero defenders will be much tougher, and hero slaves will be much more … err … enslaveable? Well no, hero slaves will also be much better as units than their regular counterparts. Heracles, who was presented last week, would be a perfect example of this, as he is the über warrior.

2) Kings. Rulers increase your mob limit. At game start, your mob can’t have more than 50 members, without counting animals and heroes. But the kings increase that number.

Take Lycaon for instance. He was king of Arcadia, quite a big shot at his prime. So much that he thought he could fool Zeus. To do that he devised a cunning plan. A cunning and incredibly, ridiculously twisted plan. He invited the lord of Olympus over for dinner and, to test if he was really all-seeing and all-knowing, he chopped off one of his own children and served him as one of the dishes. The god of thunder noticed this and was not very happy (he is a picky eater). He immediately turned Lycaon into a wolf-like creature and killed the rest of Lycaon’s children (he had like fifty of them, which may be why he thought that the best way to test someone’s omniscience was to serve them one of his kids but still…).

Currently in the game Lycaon increases your mob capacity by 25, which is  a 50% increase from your starting value. He is the king that gives the highest increase in mob capacity so far, but this comes with a high cost: when Lycaon enters the mob, he will immediately kill 25% of your people. So… yeah…

3) Healers. Do you remember Asclepius from last week? Well, he was a healer. He is THE healer, actually. The demi-god of healing and medicine. Nobody does it better. But there were many others that were also versed in the ancient mysteries of medicine, and this category is where they belong. Like Hippocrates.

You may remember Hippocrates from oaths like the Hippocratic Oath that doctors all over the world take and uphold, even up to this day. Not only was he the greatest physician of his time (and you could say he kept on being the greatest physician for centuries, since his teachings were regarded as perfect and for a long time no one even dared to seek further improvements), he was also a badass. He was imprisoned for his then radical views on medicine, and held captive for twenty years (during which time he never backed down and instead spent the time writing medical treaties). He was the Mandela of medicine but bald, and he could heal more units at the same time. So if you have an injury… if no one else can heal you… and if you can find him… maybe you can hire… Hippocrates (cue in theme music).

4) Unit Enhancers. These heroes just make other units, usually of a certain kind, be better at their stuff. So, like a super unit that makes other units neat units. For example:

Leonidas, king of the Spartans. He is remembered for leading the fearless 300 Spartan warriors that almost managed to single-handedly stop the huge invading Persian army at the battle of Thermopylae (and for lots of internet memes after the Zack Snyder movie was released). In Okhlos, Leonidas is a warrior enhancer: he increases the damage output of all the warriors in the mob like, a lot, but at the same time he reduces their defense. All warriors thus become very lethal killing machines under his command, but they may end up having supper in hell after the fight if they are not careful (they will not be).

5) Special Abilities. These heroes are the cream of the crop. The best of the best. The awesomest of the awesome. The … ok, you get the idea. These heroes each have a unique ability that is what separates them from the rest of the crowd. Not a even a programmer that has learned to code using Pascal can fit them into any category other than this generic random mix of a category that is Special Abilities. One example of a hero that has a unique special ability was Oedipus, with his cloning. Another one is Perseus.

Perseus is a another mythological figure that you may recognize from the movies. He was the main character in Clash of Titans for instance. And he killed poor old Medusa. Perseus was one Zeus’ sons (one of his many, many, many offspring) so he had that to his advantage. But he was an illegitimate child so he had… issues… with his father’s wife, Hera. Let’s say that Hera was not fond of the fruit of her husband’s escapades. Among the various wondrous items Perseus got during his adventures and travels (think half the table from the DM handbook!), he had Hades’ Cap of Invisibility. His ability in-game comes from this item, because he is able to turn the whole mob invisible to enemies until they attack (it’s an artifact, its powers are ill-defined at best).

And this is it for now. There will be more heroes, of course, hundreds! But we have to keep some surprises from you. So we bid adieu to you all until next week, when we will talk about paternity tests in the age of haruspices and meddling lightning gods.

This week we will start with an ongoing series about heroes in Okhlos.

What are the heroes?

The heroes are special unit, that are going to be scattered all over the game but that you will also be able to buy with different units.

Originally, the heroes were only going to be available for purchase with slaves. The goal was to use slaves as coins, a kind of critic to the class system in ancient Greece, and the slaves would also have another function, to carry items. We realized that those two functionalities were too important in the game, and that putting that much into a single unit type would make the others less relevant. If the players wanted to buy items, they couldn´t buy heroes. And when they bought heroes, they lost all items they were carrying.

The system was unbalanced, giving too much importance to the slaves. The best strategy was simply to gather as much slaves as possible, forgetting about the rest of the units. That is why we decided that is was best for the slaves to keep the item-carrying functionality, but that the hero-buying part would be something that could be done with any kind on unit. Now each hero costs a certain amount of units, depending on what it does. For instance, Leonidas, king of the Spartans, is going to be able to be purchased with warrior units.

Each hero is going to have special stats and characteristics.

OEDIPUS

Oedipus  is based on the hero of the same name, but we took some liberties translating him into the game. Basically he is the king that blinded himself after he realized  the great sin he had committed, which made family dinners really awkward, and made Freud rich. However, in Okhlos, his power doesn’t come from the myth, Oedipus doubles the number of people that are added to the mob. If you add a slave, you will get two slaves instead.

This is pretty useful, but is also makes it very easy to reach the mob limit fast.

Even though this seems like a non-sequitur between the myth and the in-game ability, we justify it with a Borges quote: “Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it” (“Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables, porque multiplican al hombre al infinito“).

HERACLES

In Okhlos we are constantly lobbying to get this hero called like he should be. It’s Heracles, not Hercules.

He is the son of a god and a mortal (remember that if something moved, it was very likely that Zeus would want to bang it). Heracles possess and incredible strength and can resist almost any impact. He would the archetypical tank unit, if not for the fact that each of his blows deals more than the rest of the mob combined (not true).

SPARTACUS

The Roman slave, turned leader of a popular uprising. Kind of a classical Che Guevara. Spartacus role is basically to make the slaves stronger.  Each slave will be stronger and tougher if Spartacus is in the mob.

Spartacus is like getting all your slaves on steroids. However, we condemn the use of non-virtual steroids.

ASCLEPIUS

Asclepius heals units. He is also Apollo’s son, which makes him a demigod. It’s always useful to have a healer in the mob. We still have some fine tuning to do, to see how much he will heal, and how close the other units need to be to be healed. As it is now, he is terribly unbalanced, but it’s a matter of fiddling a little until it’s right.

Another week goes by, another update. This week’s update will be divided into two parts. The first one and the second one.

Fountains

As I was telling you last week, we have changed Okhlos’ level design paradigm. I am now making chunks, that hold information about how many enemies the chunk will hold, the hazards and the little houses. Making these chunks has become a completely pleasant activity (at least for now). It’s like building dioramas. The bad thing is that it takes time (just like with dioramas).

Click to enlarge

Basically,  between drawing sprites, modeling and making little roads that are consistent within the chunks, I created a new hobby for my self. All I need now is a display that keeps the prefab spinning all day and to put it in a showcase (years of painting miniatures).

Anyway, this lead me to touching up the fountains.  The fountains had been hastily made, with the idea that I would eventually have to touch it up. Besides, putting the fountains alone made them look odd, so I had model some benches taking into consideration the fact that fountains were a meeting spot in ancient times.

First I start with the model.

I take the mesh to Unity. As with all the other textures, I use point as the filter mode, so as to give it the pixel-art-look.

(These are the typical settings we use on the textures so that they can be shown in all their pixel splendor )

Then, I add the animated sprites with 2DTollkit.

Some of you may recognize some of the characters in these fountains. It’s purely coincidental.

The gif’s resolution is not the best but you can see the animation very clearly. Also, some of the gifs are at double speed. Definitely there is some room for improvement on my gif capturing skills.

Events

This week, so as not to lose the habit, we were showing Okhlos at a little event in Argentina. There were very few attendants, but the people who had the chance to test the game were delighted with the mechanics. How the mob moves and destroys everything in its way was something everyone pretty much enjoyed. Based on what Schell says about games having to start as toys, I think we are off to good start. Moving around in the game is fun in itself, without taking into account any of other extra mechanics. While we were there we had the chance to see that some people didn’t quite understand the tutorial, so, besides promoting the game a little bit, which is always welcomed, we managed to use this event as a mini playtesting session.

The second event we “attended” was MicAtlantica. We weren’t technically there, but Okhlos was, to the rejoice of everyone attending the event. MicAtlantica is taking place in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

You can see a list of all the games in the event here. We are delighted to be able to be part of it, even if we are not there physically. Just being one of the ambassadors of the Argentinean’s game industry is quite a merit in itself. So if you are in Spain, go play it and tell us what you think!

Ahoy there! This week, I will introduce you to one of the more important changes that we’ve done to the game so far.

Here is the thing: After a careful planning and analysis, we came to the conclusion that developing 12 levels will take me (Art only) a year and a half. The cost was too damn high! Also, in a few playtesting sessions we found that players didn’t seem to fully understand the objective. In addition, we found that the challenge in the mechanics was not sooo much fun.

So, the problem was: Making levels took an incredible long time and effort, and  creating different challenges for every level felt inconsistent (like we glued a lot of different things altogether). What’s the solution? We don’t know for sure, but we found an easy way to test a new system.

Basically, using cities divided into small areas and building them up procedurally. Each world (we call each city a world, Delphi, Sparta, etc. would all be different worlds) is composed of two to five areas. You have to complete (usually, destroy) an area, in order to advance to the next one. When you reach the final area you will face the god of the world, and after you defeat the god, you will advance to the next world (Tebas, Sparta, Athens, Vegas, etc.).

This is a chunk. -Say “Hi” chunk. -Hi chunk

Each area in turn is composed of chunks. Each chunk will have data on the type of enemies that it will hold, also if it has hazards and environment stuff.

This is not only to help us deal with level design far quicker, but also pushes us forward to be able to take a lot of design decisions. The end result with this approach is that it gives Okhlos a much more arcade feeling. That’s incredible good. It feels faster, more challenging. Also, it gives us the power of infinity in the level design. That could be a lot (or absolutely zero). But definitively give us a game which is fun to replay,  where you can find new things in each playthrough. And that is amazing.

This is ye olde static delphi.

This could be the new Delphi, or not! It will always change! Science!

This could give you an idea of how the cities are gonna be. It’s composed of 3×3 chunks. Each chunk has 10×10 tiles. Each tile can have anything (enemies, props, houses, shops, hazards, etc.).

Well, all of this makes a tremendous change in the game, but we are quite enthusiast about this. We see a lot of potential for this decision, and the current build we are developing, looks amazing. As always, thanks for reading!

After the Okhlos tour,  we can now focus on what’s important: the game. At least for now, it’s incredibly difficult to cover all areas of game development, being only two guys (plus we have to do things like writing this update :P). So, this week, I kept my original plan of making Ares’ minions.

Ares was the first god we had. I chose him because in the early prototype phase, we needed a warrior god, a melee oriented boss. So Ares was the logical choice. Then we had the semi bosses, which we knew had to be sons of Ares. Ares had a lot of sons, but we focused on two of them: Phobos & Deimos. Phobos being fear, and Deimos being terror. These two concepts were strong enough to give us some interesting mechanics for the semi bosses. Also they sounded cool as hell.

Here are a few sketches of Phobos & Deimos. I think I don’t need to tell you that you can click in the picture to enlarge it.

As you see, I searched for a grimy look in Deimos, but the challenge was to not be too Hades-like. It was important not to relate Deimos with Thanatos (Death), who isn’t even sketched yet but will surely be in Hades’ rooster.

We ended up with Deimos having a white and red robe, to follow Ares’ palette. He will be more of a ranged attacker. Phobos in the other hand, was easier to design. We took him to a primal, more savage conception, with lion hair, and fire eyes. He will be more melee oriented.

The cool thing is that each of them, represents a part of Ares. Ares will have area attacks, and melee attacks as well. So, in the Ares battle, he shows the two facets of their sons.

Here are in context, Phobos, Deimos, Ares, an Ares minion, and a philosopher.

Finally, the stage has to have a lot of enemies! So we designed some cyclops and a few warriors. The good thing about this, was that we had the main animations for the ordinary cyclops, so adding some Ares clothes was not much of a problem.

You can see the comparison between two running cyclops, to see what we had to do to animate them.

Also, we introduced our first rock thrower unit! He runs, throws rocks, and dies. Doesn’t seems like much, but he can incredibly dangerous if he is in the right spot.

Below are the rest of the variations of the common units of the level, alongside Ares.

As you can see, this was all fun and games, but there is a problem. The decided to make A BIG CHANGE in Okhlos… This is driving us crazy, but we think it’s a tremendously good change. What we are changing is… [CLIFFHANGER!!! DEV BLOG POST WITH CLIFFHANGER! SO ORIGINAL!] Check out what’s the big change next week.

To finish, we want to say thanks to the people of Bundle In A Box, for nominating Okhlos for the Indie DEV grant. It’s a big honor for us being nominated. Also, if we win some money would be incredibly cool.

If you don’t know about the dev grant, basically, any person who buys a copy of the strategy bundle, can choose one of the nominated games for the grant to give them some money. The games are not in the pack, they just receive some help from the users. Also, only the most voted game will receive the money.

We are not only doing this for the potential money, (which, surely, isn’t much) but in this way, we can reach more people, and they can get to know Okhlos.

That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading!

For the last three weeks we have been “on the road” with Okhlos, doing a little show and tell / playstesting session at a local nerd fest known as Toronjapalooza, giving a talk about the history of CoffeePoweredMachine and independent game development at Buenos Aires’ largest tech exposition, Tecnópolis, and finally some more playtesting at the EVA 2013 (Argentina’s Videogames Expo). They have been extremely busy and tiresome days but also very fun and exciting. And they were also the first time we showed Okhlos outside our offices. And we learned a lot.

ToronjaPalooza

The first day at Toronjapalooza not many people played the game but most of the ones who did were kids. The youngest one was a four-year-old and the oldest ones were around twelve. We have designed Okhlos as a game that we (basically hardcore gamers with two or three decades of gaming on our backs) would like to play, and we never thought about how someone so young would approach the game, so those were uncharted territories. In addition to this the test level we had put together was ludicrously difficult to beat (mostly my fault, I tend to do that, sorry) so I was fearing an epic disaster. It wasn’t. Instead what happened was that the kids started playing the game in a different way that we had anticipated. The youngest one took to exploring, ignoring all the enemies, the hazards, just walking through the map, focusing on going through obstacles and asking the names of the trees (we had a larch). Others started a small competition to see who could get the largest mob. And one of them not only managed to complete the whole level, but when he found out that that was the only level we had made so far, he went on and finished the level again, beating Apollo’s godly ass a second time.

(Click to enlarge the picture. We put this sentence in every picture you can enlarge and still you dont get it? If it has a little hand, it’s clickeable!)

Tecnopolis

The second stop in our tour was Tecnópolis, where we presented a talk entitled something like Making Games for your Boss, for the Audience or for Yourself: the History of CoffeePoweredMachine. I say we, but It was actually Roque who gave the talk (I just sat the there with José Luis while Roque spoke and cheered him on). But we did spent quite some time working on the content of the talk, trying to put down into words (and slides) what we have learned the past few years working on our jobs in the industry, on our previous game Gravity Fleet and now on our beloved Okhlos. The talk may not have the greatest talk ever but it was a first experience and good one at that. It was also a chance to show a little of the game to more people and we even got actual people asking actual questions after the talk! In case you really want to know how the talk went out, it’s up on YouTube. And it has ENGLISH SUBTITLES! Spanish subtitles also, but I think you don’t care about that:

Another great thing about that week was the conference that took place during that time. On the main stage there were speakers like Zach Gage, Nathan Vella, Ron Carmel and Tim Schaffer and we had a chance to chat with them, to tell them what we were doing, asking their advice and simply hanging around these cool people. It was amazing.

This photo is from the party that took place the friday after the talks:

Sad to say goodbye to all our new Argentinian friends! Thanks for making us all feel so at home! pic.twitter.com/j1Fo3En1RT

— Tim Schafer (@TimOfLegend) October 26, 2013

EVA

(Photo by Flauros Geek Photo)

And after that came the EVA, were we sat down with a notebook and a controller and showed the game to the people around, which was mostly fellow game developers and hardcore gamers. Everyone we met was very enthusiastic and we got quite a lot feedback from just a couple of hours of playtesting. The feedback was very useful, especially since it came mostly from people with game development experience and knew how to pinpoint specific issues, but at the same time we approached the playtesting with something that Ron Carmel had remarked in the talk he had given last week. We focused on how people played the game, on why did they do some things differently from what we would do. Why they would see things about the game in a different way than us. Sometimes the feedback they gave us shed some light on this, sometimes it was about completely different things, but we tried to keep our focus on that.

 (Yet another awesome photo by Flauros Geek Photo)

One thing I discovered that was pretty interesting in this regard was seeing how a person who has just played the explains the game to another. Let’s say Joe sits down a plays for a while until Lady Marie Von Teslette comes around, then Joe tries to tell her what the game is about and how you play it. I realized that paying attention to what Joe says is a good way to see which things made the most impact on him, which things seemed more important to him. In addition to that Lady Marie Von Teslette gets to approach the game in yet a different way, that is not either Roque or me trying almost desperately (and almost futilely) to tell her how awesome, interesting and special the game is, nor is it just the game on in itself. It is a bit closer to having a friend tell you about a game or reading something in a blog, which how most people end up coming into contact with a game.

And lastly, another thing I realized these last weeks, perhaps the most important thing, is that it’s great to watch people play your game, have fun, get excited about it. It makes it all worthwhile.

We were working hard to get to the IGF, unfortunately we couldn’t get a stable version on time, also there were a lot of visual things to change, so we decided to give it a try the next year.

One of the things that pushed us back, was a shader problem. We were using transparent sprites, so as to have fade out effects and the like, and that turned out to be a bit of problem when we tried to make the sprites emit and receive shadows. It is not trivial to calculate how a transparent object deals with shadows so that took a while to deal with. Finally, yesterday we did find a work around for this (which ended up being quite simple, our solution was having double sided planes on the sprites and switching shaders). Anyway, this is how the sprites look with the shadows on:

(Click to enlarge the picture)

In the screen, you can see two light emitters: the torch and the ambient light. You can see how the first philosopher receives the light from the torch, how the three characters emit shadows and how the background sprites receive shadow. All the complications we had, fixed in a marvelous picture.

This is a vine version, (I’ve just downloaded the app :P) :

And finally, the incredible youtube version, of a classic day in Delphi:

This our last update before the IGF’s submission deadline. We are focussing all of our efforts on being able to reach Saturday with a working version of Okhlos. This is practically our wallpaper: http://t.co/hZUONGu0ri

We still don’t know if we’ll be able to submit a version of Okhlos, because we think that it’s better not to send anything at all than sending a poor version of the game. We’ll always have next year (and Paris).

To illustrate this short update, here is a graphic representation of the feeling around here.

That’s one of Apollo’s arrows, reaching a poor philosopher. We would be the philosopher, and the IGF would be the arrow. I have the pathological need to explain the obvious.

Next week we will return to our usual updates! Full of joy and uninteresting facts.

Like we have for the past weeks, we are crunching time a lo loco to be able to have a prototype for the IGF. This translates into long hours and no weekends until the 19th of october. We have eleven days left, and one of the last things I did was to animate the bad guys in Delphi.
In Delphi, we have four main enemies (the two oracular guards, the griffons and the giants) and a boss (Apollo).

The oracular guards

They are divided into two kind of enemies. The Prophetai, and the Hosioi.

The historical Prophetai were usually the ones who interpreted the oracle, according to most records at least. In the game, not only are they part of the baddies, but they summon other baddies as well. And they do a subpar job interpreting prophecies.

The Hosioi were more guardians/warriors kind of monks, the protectors of the sacred sactuary and the oracle. So it’s only logical that they throw fireballs at will.

(The  .gif above is interactive. You can imagine how the fireball will be)

These animations were not much of a challenge. When we had the green bad guy animated, we took it to grayscale, and then repainting it red. With a few tweaks, we had the majority of the animations of the red one, and then I focused on the attack animation, that was the only animation that had different with the green Prophetai.

Here, you can see the grayscale process to repaint the tunic. It’s not being lazy, it’s being “productive”.

The Griffon

The griffon was complicated, because it flies. Anything that has wings is difficult to animate. To that, add the fact that the griffons could be anywhere  in the level, so it had to have a front and back sprite for every stance.

Another problem with the griffon, was that originally  it was going to be an ordinary griffon (with claws, talons, feathers and everything), but in the middle of the process we came to think that they seemed to have little to no relation with the rest of the level. So we turned them into mechanical griffons, made of gears and clay like the giants who watch the city, and in this way it made more sense to include them.

This is a comparison between the old griffon and the new mechanical one.

This gives to the city, a more controlled dystopia look. And makes the griffons look like they were put there intentionally.

And remember, never animate anything with wings. It’s horrible.

The Giant

The giants in Delphi are the ones who keep everything in order, and they don’t allow groups of three or more people in the streets. So they will attack you if you cross their paths. But they will not chase you. Came to think, they are more of a hazard than an enemy. But you can kill them, though.

Animating them was a bit of a pain, because I had to draw some poses entirely, and in my mind I hoped that I could animate everything moving the already made parts.

Making this animation was the ideal, just moving parts. Unfortunately, animations for like the attack one, I  had to draw a lots of new parts.

Finally, the most demanding enemy, Apollo.

Apollo

Apollo took a lot of work and planning.  We had to figure how the animation was going to suggest  the user to do some things or to anticipate an attack. Also, we made animations that were easy to loop or delay to respond to certain situations.

I wanted to do the majority of the animations using moving parts, like I did with the giant. Unfortunately, all the animations were so different that I had to establish some pipeline to draw keyframes and turn them into pixel art.

First, I drew the key frames, the more important poses. They were not intended to be perfect, they only needed to be a guideline to make the pixel art part.

(Click in the picture to enlarge it)

These are quick sketches. When I have the main pose, I scale it down to fit the pixel counterpart.

I learned that if I scaled down the sketch with nearest neightbor, I could use it at base and pixel on top of it. Billinear was, obviously of not help at all.

So, in a few days I almost had all of Apollo’s animations, like this one (I love the idle animations, there is something about the balance between being subtle and making it move).

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