Pariah: Anton – progress report #1

“Pariah: Anton” is our next upcoming game. It is going to be a combination of tower defense game and a 2D sidescroller set in an apocalyptic cyberpunk world. The game will have a background story with as little text as possible (Yeah… I’m a fan of Hyper Light Drifter and Kingdom).

Game info

Player’s main mission will be to gather chips, upgrade his base, craft robots, assign them roles, upgrade them, destroy the spawns of hostile creatures (zombies, monsters and probably other god forsaken creatures.) and escape from planet. The game won’t focus as much on player’s main character as on building base and crafting robots. The crafting system will be as simple as possible, but still enjoyable. Each playthrough will be different because the map is always going to be randomly generated.

Release

We are aiming to release the game on a PC in September and when the time is going to be right, we’re gonna try our best to greenlight the game on a Steam market.

Progress

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the architecture of the whole game, the player’s movement, which events will be tracked, AI for robots, zombies, monsters etc..

I still don’t have a lot to show you, but till now, I’ve imported a simple sprite (from the asset store) which represents the player (no complicated animations or any other fancy stuff because the main character is still in the drawing board), I’ve imported a sun and a moon drawn by Žiga. The ground is currently decorated with a tileset which will not be used in the final game – we’re aiming for cyberpunk style palette and a little bit simpler shapes.

Player controls

Because the game mainly focuses on the AI of robots and Enemies, the player controls are going to be quite simple. Player is going to be able to walk, dash and use an action button. In video you can see player walking, dashing and dropping chips (without animations :D).

Day and night

Night will stand for terror and will spawn waves of monsters. Day will serve for exploration. I’ll have to figure out which length of day and night will fit the game tempo. We really don’t want player to get bored. That’s why I’m thinking about adding special events which can occur anytime and will lure player to explore the unknown.

Biome generation

World’s will be made out of different “biomes”. Currently we have plan to create biomes for: Base, Grassfield, Forest, Junkyard, Factory. Base will always spawn in the middle of the world and will server as a starting point for our player. Player will be able to expand his base to other biomes. I’ll write more about biomes in the future devlogs. For now I have developed a world generation system which semi-randomly chooses and position biomes in the game.

In video you can see biomes colored for debugging purposes:

• Base: cyan
• Grassfield: yellow
• Forest: green
• Junkyard: magenta
• Factory: red

We still have a long way to go to finish our “Pariah”. but then again:

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. – Lao Tzu

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Filip

anton game introduction pariah

The journey of game art and design

Seeing our game Math Panda on google play store published, and most of all, my own graphics, made me really proud and hyped for the next project.

I was always only into programming. My work consisted of PHP development with Laravel framework and frontend technologies. Chasing that bits of code from one project to another made me always proud of my work and excited of doing it, but never fulfilled.

When I was developing my own wordpress template, I have realized that no matter how brilliant code I write, there is still a gap in my mind. Soon I realized that I want to dig deeper and start making my own art, graphics and designs. I started to learn drawing with my hands which made me more than excited. From sketch like 7 year old could make, I evolved my skills to something that I can be proud of. It was a time that I put that enthusiasm into computer graphics.

I came up with idea of making a first android game, called my friends and we organized “hackaton with a purpose of making our first android game. I wanted to create my first game design. That’s the reason I started learning Affinity Designer, which is a great alternative for Adobe Illustrator. I managed to come up with all the graphics, including game design, icons and banners in only 2 weeks.

Future

Seeing our game Math Panda on google play store published, and most of all, my own graphics, made me really proud and hyped for the next project. Not even a day passed by and Filip contacted me with a new idea for a game. He presented me the idea of making “Pariah: Anton” – an indie pixel based game.

Yessss. New challenge! Of course I will be a part of it. From my view this is a new opportunity to learn and make pixel art. For pixel graphics and animations I am currently using Pyxel Edit. Simple, yet powerful program for pixel art. Coming from vector graphics to pixels is a big change. Learning how pixels work, choosing positions and colours, shading, presenting more with less has become my daily routine. As hard as it seems, its my new thing! The thing which makes you wake up in the morning, which gives you purpose and meaning in your live.

Let the journey begin.

anton pariah pixel art