Hi again!

A little update about the progress on KREEP:

Since the major programming tasks got out of the way in the first phase of development, last week were and the upcoming weeks will be about content. I've been mostly working on tile assets. I've settled on the main graphical style a while ago, so been mostly cranking out individual tile assets, color palettes, and some tile animations. Progress was kind-of steady, slowly advancing towards a final core tile set and an overall map look and feel.

The direction and what am I trying to achieve:

I'm shooting for a retro pixel art feel, but to further define this, I'm trying to make it look like a "turn based blocky/grid-based roguelike". I know the game is a real time sci-fi action shooter , but since the map and movement is discrete (you can only move a full tile, like in Pac-Man or in many roguelikes), I wanted to achieve a look which suggests this to the player and the whole grid is easy to read while playing. Hence when creating a tile I simply start from the same base (a 3 colored "panel" with a one-pixel wide dark border and even darker four corners) and with tiny modification and by searching for a good 3 or 4 color palette, I push pixels until I find it pleasant looking .

A sneek-peek:



If I find some colors fitting a tile well, I copy all the good-looking existing tiles and apply the colors to them. This could somewhat be achieved with color tinting when rendering the sprites, but I think that route does not allow good enough control over the final look!
The player colors are done with tinting on the last screenshots and I'm totally not satisfied with the results, so that is going change sooner or later too!

Also started working on some tile animations to juice up the look of the levels. I've put some moving stuff near each other for a GIF, enjoy:



By the end of next I week, I will have a close to finished tile set for most of the levels (maybe some extras will still be missing but not much). I will try to put together some sample levels more representative of the final map designs.