Animated bramblebush hazard, before and after the changes! Players weren’t really recognizing the regular bush as a hazard (the one below), but a friend said that if it was animated it might work better. So I made this crazy undulating monstrosity that had multiple complex animations. That is, some of the vines are intertwined and cross over on top of each other. I didn’t realize how tricky that kind of thing is to animate until it was time to add proper outlines and color!

Pixel’s quantum entanglement lab for the home base area in Unstable Scientific. I really had to push my imagination hard with this one, because most of the time in labs like this you only see things happen via the instruments!

RATE MY SETUP! It’s Chandra Cassini’s lab for the home base area in Unstable Scientific. She studies the cosmic microwave background radiation, searching for signs of early collisions with another universe!

Lev and Tau’s Vacuum Resonance Soliton lab, tiny island edition. Making progress on the home base level!

This is Pixel’s chemistry lab, for the home base level! That’s Pixel with a sort-of randomly generated NPC for flair on the left. I had so much fun using references from photos I took in actual labs, though I took a lot of artist liberties to make the animations more dynamic.

Even with the craziness of early autumn, I still managed to get this rogue semiconductor lab animation finished. Vapor deposition chamber, spinning band column extraction thingy, and inert-gas-glovebox! This cute little background animation took more work than 85% of anything else I’ve made in the game so far!

I created a system in Photoshop in order to generate sprites of custom NPCs with a wide variety of assets such as hair and clothing, all without writing a line of code!

I just animated this fabric-creating device that’s going to be in Pixel’s chemistry lab. I actually had to look at a number of real devices that manufacture nylon and weave it, and then combine them into this fictional “absurdium-weave” device. How do industrial designers working for film and video games do it?

I made an animation of a toxic spore bursting! When I design the SFX, I frequently export the WAV file and import it into Premiere to make sure that the timing is correct for all the little sections - inflation, moment of burst, etc.

I love using Procreate on the iPad for storyboarding and just going over the top with lighting effects. It’s so much more fun than straight pen and ink!

Lev and Tau are working on something really intensely here…

Back to working on the Lava Lands background. Some months away from it let me figure out how to get the right atmosphere, as well as actually pick up some of the skills to draw it the right way. The idea is to have these flashes be a bit more random, but also have actual lightning bolts come down!

We’ve been working on a number of new mechanics for the Silver Craters levels - a manifold fruit that sucks in everything around it, walls of bubbles coming out of the ground, and a powerful pink geyser blast. There’s always a good deal of debugging and polishing that needs to be done, but tonight we’re kind of happy with how far we’ve come!

Lev has too much paperwork!

This is a WIP opening cutscene for Unstable Scientific! I got a bit too ambitious and made FMV animation for some of it, but other parts are still just in sketch mode. But you can see the characters and the backstory exposition dump!

Original music by the Supermarcato Brothers!

Screenshots from the Silver Craters and Basalt Bluffs levels!

Custom spectrometer sketch to be used in one of the cutscenes.

Updated forest/jungle level BG to be taller and deeper.

One of the trees from the Basalt Bluffs level. I finished it this week, using Pixaki to get through a lot of the more tedious parts on my ipad. I’m using a lot of bristlecone pines as a reference to get the ancient look for the trees, but I know, I know they’re from a different ecosystem entirely… And yes, it’s inspired by Evynd Earle!

I’m not really a coder, but I don’t want to have to wait to see how the background art will look when it scrolls - and I want to troubleshoot it before it gets to Dustin.  So I made a little Processing sketch to see how the landscape will scroll. It’s not perfect, can only do horizontal (not vertical parallax), and has a weird bug, but effectively gets the job done.