Valerie - Game Development Blog

In this post I want to talk about some of my thought processes and inspirations for Valerie's sprite design. She's the player character of a 2D platformer game, so there were several things I needed to consider before committing to it. I'm no professional, so take any of this advice with a teaspoon of salt! Let's get into it. Colours   This is her bouncy little idle animation in the game.   One of the first things you might notice is the limited palette. Each colour only has two tones - light and shade, which limits the level of detail and gives a slightly cartoony look. It does however give the very valuable bonus of efficiency!   I want to be efficient, but one shade per colour is a bit much...   I'm only one person, and I knew from the start that the main character would have lots of animations (she has 687 frames at the moment). Making these animations is one of my favourite bits, but the more colours you use, the more time-consuming it will be to make each sp...

Game developers have come up with lots of creative ways of making objects in video games behave similarly to the real world. All of the falling, bumping and bouncing that they do needs to be simulated in a strict way that a computer can process. In this post I'll discuss several methods for this in the context of 2D platformers, and then how I ended up doing it in my game Valerie . In the early days, this would pretty much always be done using a tiled system. Everything was based around tiles, bec ause it's a really efficient way of sorting out graphics and information into chunks. [1] In the original Super Mario Bros, all of the game's graphics are stored in this pattern table. You can only see four colours here, but the palette can be changed for each tile. If you want your game to involve slopes, this can get very complicated as every tile needs to represent a different kind of slope. Slightly later games were able to pull it off, the most famous of which being the Son...

(This is a music track from the game called 'Phantom of the Woods'... feel free to play it as you read.) What is it? Valerie is a 2D platformer adventure game for Windows inspired by the likes of Cave Story and Celeste. It follows the story of our protagonist, Valerie: Having crash-landed a plane on a snowy mountainside, Valerie is rescued by two children whose dad has gone missing. Despite being stranded herself, she becomes wrapped up in their circumstances and sets out to help them while uncovering the mysterious situation. Companionship, danger and magic awaits!           Abilities Valerie has magic abilities that go well with her agile nature. The bubblegun ability allows her to trap objects in a bubble, sealing away threats while providing a trampoline-like surface for her to bounce from. Jumping on the bubble at the right angle is important to soar in the right direction! An example of how you can use the bubblegun .     And the boost ...