Anodyne 2: Return to Dust
[002] July Updates, plans
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2D, Revealed!
The past month we've focused on getting the 2D gameplay up and running, as well as creating some 2D art. We posted a glimpse of the art last week.
https://twitter.com/sean_HTCH/status/1017442460170010629
What can we discern from this GIF....?
1. It appears some objects may be dangerous!
2. Nova becomes some kind of vacuum robot, who can suck and shoot things!
3. Is that the slime from Anodyne 1?
4. Hmm, this art style looks familiar...
5. ...and so does the size of the screen.
How will this figure into the story and gameplay... ? What are the circumstances under which you enter 2D? You'll have to wait to find out!
New Challenges
The coding has been interesting, while much of it is familiar due to Anodyne 1, a large difference is carrying around and shooting objects and enemies, which requires a more complex code architecture. Some objects have to respawn when you leave the screen, but what if you shoot an object offscreen? Should it disappear or stay on the next screen? Luckily, Unity makes it relatively easy to manage.
Music
I've also worked on a few music drafts. I have not shared all of them, but you can get a small taste of the audio direction for Anodyne 2 here: https://soundcloud.com/seagaia/anodyne-2-ost-r1marchdraft-1 .
Figuring out the 'sound' for Anodyne 2 has been a little challenging. There's a number of factors at play - what I'm musically interested in, the needs of the game, and fan expectations. Therefore I chose a direction which uses instruments from 90s sound chips (like Anodyne), and I am avoiding reverb when possible. If you've played All Our Asias, the music will be more melody focused than that, probably less ambient. There's an active focus on simple memorable melodies.
Current Goals
We are working on a playable alpha for business reasons. This involves getting the first 15 minutes or so of the game working, so there's been a lot of code architecture improvements to make room for the many things we'll implement. We've also had to think about the UI, how saving should factor into level design, the flow of dialogue and cutscenes, transitions from 2D to 3D, as well as designing some 3D spaces and creating new and revising old dialogue.
Mixing 2D and 3D together has been challenging but we think you will enjoy the way in which we unite the two.
Comments
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Nice! Would love to hear more about your 3D art process, more specifically texturing, and also about what I guess is a render to texture camera. Cheers!
I will cede to Marina for the 3D stuff!
In Unity you can tell a camera to render to a Render Texture. And so if the render texture dimensions are small, the image gets kind of grainy/low-res which is nice for some art styles. Then the render texture acts like an image file Unity can use, and it can be displayed in the game's UI.
will this remain a computer-only game or are console versions considered as well? I had a good time with the first Anodyne but I no longer play on PC, so a PS4 (or even better, Vita) release would be awesome, especially with the art style that's so reminiscent of the PS1 games.
Console is planned, but porting to console is often resource-intensive so we can't guarantee anything at the moment, however we are interested in Switch, PS4 and XBone versions.