It’s been a slow fortnight or so since my last post but here’s just a quick, quirky update on the aesthetics.

So I’ve been experimenting with a few different art styles from bold and curvy to thin and straight stroked styles to find one I’m comfortable with and one that accentuates the gameplay and feel.  I’ve settled on a medium thickness stroke that has a slight kink so that everything isn’t perfectly straight.  It’s not perfect yet but it’s definitely an improvement.  I have even tried adding a jeans-like stitching to the tile edges and to Gigi (the protagonist) and this looked pretty cool but it would’ve pushed the game towards revolving around that theme and I felt it would clash with the general mood and pace of the game.  Besides Kirby’s Epic Yarn pretty much perfected that theme into an entire game.  Never played it mind but looks very interesting and heard mostly good stuff about it.
Anyway I did some messing about with distortion maps and shaders in an attempt to stylise the game further and this was what it looked like during the first test:

Well it sure helped with the style but somehow I think this wont go down well although they may arise a situation where this will be handy but I can’t really see one unless there’s a  object that makes Gigi trip out 🙂

I took out the sharp changes in colour and smoothed out the distortion map to get something more of what I was aiming for:

Ahhh much better.  The world looks more natural and has a quirky look to it but what the screenshot doesn’t show is the subtle flaws in the character movement as he passes through the differing distortion bands.  I’ve yet to try removing the player from the effect but to be honest I think drawing the sprites wonky myself will look infinitely better and I can manage that without too much effort so bye bye distortion (for now anyway).

Lastly, here’s one just for fun and it’s essentially the same as the previous screenshot’s setup but the effect is multiplied by a factor of a hundred. hehe:

Thanks for reading and I’ll hopefully have more soon 🙂

– Marios