Well, I didn’t get a trailer done before the new year, but things are still chugging along. I did want to remind everyone once again that I have a more-frequently-updated video devlog over on YouTube, if you’re not subscribed. Maybe I should have always been cross-posting those here, but I always found it a bit nice to keep the two devlogs separate, especially since some people prefer to just read or skim rather than sit down and watch a video. Here’s the latest episode of that if you do want to watch:
I’ve been continuing testing and polishing the game. There are still a couple major things that need to be done, but there are also dozens of minor problems that I’ve been clearing up.
One of those minor problems is readability issues in the environment. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where you can or cannot walk. For example, below is a before/after comparison of the cliff overlooking the Mine area. The player is standing at the edge of a several hundred foot drop-off, but due to a lack of contrast, it was often misread by players as being level with everything else. The added darkness creates a good contrast and foreground/background separation, and it also fades away when you enter into the area, keeping things readable from a gameplay perspective.
One of my art weaknesses is that I often don’t use enough contrast. Perhaps one excuse for my fear of contrast in doing the art for Taiji is that I wanted to avoid distracting noise. But this desire to avoid noise has unfortunately led much of the artwork to look very flat. I still think the art for the game is “good enough.” There’s no way I can go through and try to fix every single thing in the game at this point, but I’m trying to fix the worst spots. And moving forward it’s something that I’ll try to improve upon in future projects.
Hopefully I’ll have that release date announcement trailer to show you sooner rather than later, but I don’t want to put it out until I feel solid about a release date.
Thanks for reading!
Taiji 