Hi, I'm Bacrylic. I'm the acting art director and sole artist/animator for Squaretale, a two man indie development group currently making their first game. Our game, The Book of Alex, will be a pixel, metroidvania fantasy adventure. We've been working on this on and off for quite some time. Due to real life constraints we've only been able to dish out the time as of late. Conceptually our inspiration derives from the movie The Pagemaster and the game Kingdom Hearts. Where in you play as Alex who world dives into public domain stories and has to fight creatures and take quests in order to clear up the corruption of the originals. Btw we're going with the original stories, not the Disney clean up stuff. I'm talking the dark and twisted shit. Anyway here is our progress, I'd appreciate any feedback I can get.

14 hours ago, Bacrylic said:

With the amount of empty(ish) space in the top areas of full camera screens above, I can see a lot more of this kind of stuff perhaps going on. I like your art style, good lighting and still appears to be production friendly.  Finally, I actually envy your enemy character concepts. Those are something special.

2 hours ago, GoliathForge said:

With the amount of empty(ish) space in the top areas of full camera screens above, I can see a lot more of this kind of stuff perhaps going on. I like your art style, good lighting and still appears to be production friendly.  Finally, I actually envy your enemy character concepts. Those are something special.

Thank you very much. We’re fond of our enemies as well. I wanted something like a species type. Started with the little guy, and built out from there.

Great work and very neat details!

Maybe you should try some different timings on the weapons for more weight (acceleration on heavy stuff etc.). Stretching the arms back a bit more to give it more punch (anticipation). 

By no means the animations are bad. Just a suggestion too perfection

Wow, great work!

The animated character reminds me a little bit of the one from Another world, the artworks are very nice! It makes you want to know more, congratulations!

On 5/20/2019 at 2:44 AM, A_Mc said:

Great work and very neat details!

Maybe you should try some different timings on the weapons for more weight (acceleration on heavy stuff etc.). Stretching the arms back a bit more to give it more punch (anticipation). 

By no means the animations are bad. Just a suggestion too perfection

Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind. I’m currently working on some level design issues but wholeheartedly intend to retouch the animations 

The first two screenshots look pretty generic but from the gifs onwards they are pretty cool, specially the movement, to make easy hit effects i suggest using typing flowing out from the enemies or from the protagonist's attacks, like magic particles but with letters

Progress Update

I've been pretty busy and haven't had a lot of free time to dev. I usually forget to update the forums as I'm more active on twitter or discord groups. I want to change that a bit so here's what has changed or been happening lately.

Hi, honestly everything you're showing us looks really amazing and creative. The only thing that doesn't do it for me is this hyper-generic, unrelatable and (in my modest opinion !) boring and seen a billion times before white teenager character as a main protagonist. This guy does a disservice to the game as far as I'm concerned, because I could care a lot about all the wonderful, imaginative things that go all over the place with stuff coming out of books and all, but I really couldn't care less about this guy, haha.