Influenced by classic and modern games, World of Anterra is an innovative, open world roleplaying game.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
There are so many exciting things happening in World of Anterra, but our main focus now is on finishing the features and content for our Backer Demo. While most of the team is currently deep in the trenches battling bugs (think Starship Troopers), the rest of us get to work on content and polishing with all the cool new features in the game. There's quite a list of things in our "ready to share" backlog, but today's update will be a mix of behind the scenes and new stuff.
Palette swapping is a technique where all the colours of an asset are swapped for new ones by the game engine. This was first introduced in video games back when computers lacked the resources to manage large amounts of assets, so palette swapping allowed developers to reuse assets and animations by changing the colours on them. In World of Anterra, however, we don't have to worry about limiting our assets. One of the wonderful things about modern pixel art games is that the assets are all so tiny compared to 3D games. The reason we wanted to adding a palette swapping system is to extend our asset library without requiring the art team to redo all the assets every time. This doesn't mean that we will have less unique assets and just swap colours; this means that any number of the hundreds or thousands of hand animated assets in the game can be easily scaled up to 2, 3, or even 10 times the amount! This also means that our game will have many more options for player customization.
Here are some examples of palette swapping in our game and how it applies to each layer. Remember that these NPCs are all wearing the same things and all we're doing is swapping the colours.
With our palette swapping system, all an artist has to do is give us a set of palettes in the form of a tiny strip as shown in the image above. This system can be used for anything from creatures to furniture.
Something else to note here is how the art team works to limit their palettes. This is part of the magic of pixel art. Not only does it use so few pixels, it also uses a limited number of colours, but still manages to create a wonderful amount of detail.
When times are tough, and people are mean in the Kickstarter comments, it really helps to blow some things up in Anterra.
There is a powerful substance in Anterra that is generally used for mining in the Mancian Wastelands, but it can also be found in other places around Anterra. The substance is very volatile and needs to be handled with care, but in the right hands it can be very useful for things like exploration or combat.
Remember to keep your distance! It's always good to keep some extra fuses on hand, unless you're able to igniting it from afar. Fuses can be found, purchased or crafted, so there won't be a shortage of them.
As for our explosions, they are made by combining layers of hand animated sprites with procedural effects. Here's a small sample of the handmade animated assets.
Thanks for reading our update. Stay tuned for more!
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
As you may have noticed from the teaser in our last update, we have updated all the water effects in World of Anterra! This may not seem like a big feature, but water plays an important role in Anterra. Water factors into multiple game mechanics and features. For example, we have both shallow water and deep water environments and there are resources, creatures and enemies that can only be found in or near water... plus fishing and sailing.
Multiple techniques and systems have to come together to make our water look so good, but most important is the use of shaders.
What is a shader? Well, no one really knows except for Cameron... but I'll try my best to explain it. Shaders are small programs which run on the GPU that are used to turn boring environments into beautiful ones. Shaders were originally made for creating shadows, hence the name, but nowadays they are used for so much more, like water! Shaders work on the GPU at various stages of the rendering pipeline to dramatically improve the quality of what shows up on the screen.
That's our water effects! Hope you like it as much as we do.
Can't wait to see you splashing around in Anterra, just be careful not to drown your horse!
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.