PG Dev History Vol.02 -The Pre-Designs-

Hi everyone! It's lvlv!

Here comes the second part of the development story!

In the last part, the design for Lenga and Floody was decided. After that, I quickly turned to check the resolution of the game. 

Compared with the retro games, I decided to make the native resolution of PG 640*360.

The basic tile size in the picture is 24*24, which is a horribly wrong number. It got changed to 32*32 later.

But how big the characters will be on the screen was pretty much confirmed in the phase.

A test background was made soon after confirming the resolution.

During that time, Lenga's sprite sheet was extended considerably. He was almost ready to be implemented. 

Radian's design was confirmed at the same time. 

Shutendouji and Vitos are both my former original characters, so after a few tweaks, they were ready as well. I directly edit their designs when doing their dialogue sprites.

I stopped my personal Patreon update in Aril.2018 and concentrated on making more art resources. Floody's battle resources for the 1st demo were completed around May, it was about the time to actually make it! 

(But actually, it is not an efficient way to create games. The best way is to use dummy resources at the beginning and replace them with real ones later.)

(Floody Arena)

(Floody Sprite Sheets)

With the graphics ready, 266 programmed the game at a flashy speed like... we almost made the demo in a month. 

Animation control, collision detection, enemy AI, dialogue system, CG display, and battle flow control, he
quickly programmed these soon after I submitted the document. This gave me a huge confidence about finishing this project. Before his "magic", I would just still keep it as a dream.

Although I clearly knew that it was just a liiiiiiittle piece of the game, making the whole thing would just be another story...

With the DEMO finished around October, I started preparing for the Patreon initial campaign!

Many friends asked me why I didn't choose Kickstarter to crowdfund the game. There are 2 main reasons for this:

1. Kickstarter is just not an option for me in my region. We can't get the money properly in our country. And I have been using Patreon for a long time.  I am more familiar with how to deal with it.

2. This project was so "strange" that it might not go well due to its uncommon game type in the BL genre. So we may need an initial campaign to get it started, and then, we will still need extra money to keep everything going. Kickstarter is just not able to do that.

Thankfully this worked for my project...! And it's all you guys' support that got us to the goal!

(Some Of The Campaign Materials)

The campaign lasted for 2 months at the end of 2018. 2 months later, the development was formally started.

I invited one of my friends Ark Alpha, who was really good at pixel art, to help me design certain enemies. The "Knight" enemies are mostly by his hand. The process works like this:

·Ark designs the enemy first.

·I redraw them to fit the art style.

·Ark helps make the in-between frames.

(Process Of Granite Knight)

Other enemies are just directly designed by me.

Also, menus were designed in early 2019. But they were just, there... not implemented yet:

From today's view of point... it needs some big changes if we want to port the game to mobile platforms......

For the rest of 2019, we were constructing the basic structure of the game, like the equipment system, skill system, bond system, room system, map system, and so on. 

I remember after we made the first full stage of the game(which is actually the 2nd area), we released a 2nd DEMO. Maybe that's the most well-known version of the game...?😂

The 2nd DEMO was already presenting the full vision of the game. What was left was to finish everything else!

Sounds like it is going to be finished soon right? And that "everything else" took us another 3 years!  🤣

Let's keep it for the next post then!

See you! XD