Adventures in animating water, a process description with lots of sketches.

Continuing work on the Waterfall Level background. More columnar basalt,!

Here’s some of the process for making the waterfalls level background and animation.

We can finally capture video again! This is part of a forest level for Unstable Scientific - we’ve got bubble rocks, patrol bugs, and swarm bots happening now, plus music by the Super Marcato Brothers!

Some of the process for designing the AI boss bot. I spent a lot of time looking at a sea urchin carapace, metal reflections, and H. R. Giger art details. Not including the animations yet!

You can feed the patrol bug bananas!

I just finished the art for the simplest enemy we’re going to have: A cute patrol bug with sharp spikes to be a bother. Doesn’t take much to set this guy little off!

Some super-basic forest level action! We have swarm-intelligence wasps that sting you and music by the awesome Super Marcato Brothers. This isn’t a complete level by any means, just a test to see what kind of creatures and mechanics we need to make next. :-D

New enemy - the swarming mine mothership! This gif doesn’t really show the swarming behaviors though - that’s for a later video.

Yay, new splash screen!

iFest 2018 rocked! It was amazing to see so many game devs showing off their creations, and even better to see people of all ages trying the games out. Many of the games had gorgeous art, others had an imaginative premise, and ALL of the people who attended were super-sweet. Dustin and I had a marvelous time. Plus, so many people came to try out Unstable Scientific! We got great feedback which made us really happy.

Some of the looping textures I’ve made for our game. Textures are by far the trickiest thing for me to create for Unstable Scientific! I find it so difficult to convert a super-complex pattern down into pixels in a way that you can still interpret it - being an ink artist for so long, I’ve always had the luxury of getting in as much detail as I wanted, so I got kinda lazy in the realm of actual synthesis!

What happens when you use the sleep dart on yourself!

We’ve got a plasma gun and enemy drones using a similar weapon! Even though this post is meant to highlight a feature we added earlier, it’s using a newer iteration of our game that now has save points!

Yayyyy we now have a REALTIME landscape editor! Thanks to Dustin’s intense coding focus, we now have something resembling real ground! (also I’m quite proud of the pahoehoe lava texture - that was pretty hard to get right).

We took Unstable Scientific to Playtest Thursday at the NYU Game Center in Brooklyn (and got really good feedback as to what’s good and what needs to be fixed)! I was blown away at how many developers there are, as well as the sheer diversity of game devs and game design students. It was FANTASTICALLY FUN!

Quantum chemist and entanglement researcher, Pixel Harding!

Lev deep lava death animation. We eventually got rid of insta-death mechanics and turned the lava into a temporary death pit, where you come back to the nearest solid land with only significant health loss but no lengthy level reloads.

Early character sketches for Unstable Scientific. I draw the faces, Dustin scribbles what emotions he thinks they express. It’s a lot harder to make good expressions with so few pixels in a hi-bit game, so I try to really get the character down on paper before turning them into pixel art! You can kind of see them evolve a little bit over time, especially Tau (guy with the AR rig) and Chandra (pilot lady with floofy jacket).

This came out delightfully gross.