Blood Ship: Day 19

I opened the trial version of Spine and my eyes glazed over immediately. The second I saw the default marionette, I remembered my first time trying out the software. It's impressive stuff, but I don't think it's what I want at the moment, which sucks because I still want to play around with it.

A few days ago I said I was leaning away from pixel art. Now I'm leaning towards it. One reason is I fucking love Aseprite and how quickly I can go from creating something to seeing it in my game. To be clear, everything I'm creating right now is still placeholder art, but at least it's my placeholder art, which can be tailored to my enemy behavior. Doing art for the enemies gives me ideas for behavior, and creating behavior gives me ideas for the art, so it's best to juggle the tasks.

Having a better idea of what the finished product will look like will also help me design levels which compliment the art and vice versa. And, frankly, switching up tasks keeps me from getting bored. I think the player mechanics are as good as they're going to get (until I get feedback, anyway), so now is the right time to think about art. I'm not sure if now is the right time to think about backgrounds (and what degree of interaction the player will have with them), but that's a discussion for another time.

At the moment, everything is in four shades of gray because I don't even want to think about color schemes until I have at least most of the enemies in the game. And you know what? It kind of looks cool, black and white.