Tributary Style and Design

First Written    Thu Sep 30 12:55:42 2021
File Modified    Wed Feb 14 18:32:26 2024
Latest Upload    Thu Sep 19 03:09:54 2024

I started Tributary in 2021, as one of my first two major Godot projects.

One of my goals for this project is, unlike some of my older games, to progress the project along all axes of development at the same time!

What I had done for a lot of my Game Maker games was use grey backgrounds and placeholder art that would inevitably remain forever, while putting most of my effort into designing game mechanics.

From an "improve my game programming skills fast" perspective, this was more than fine. But on the whole, it led to a lot of mechanically complex games that just weren't shareable because they never looked complete!

Thankfully, now that I'm out of university and have free time again, I've been getting back into art and writing, and now I have no excuse but to create complete works.

For Tributary, and maybe most of my Godot games going forward, I'll be doing my best to stick to a set of ill-defined rules that future me might change at will.

In order of importance:

1. No programmer art!
   • Not for terrain, not for backgrounds, and especially not for items!
2. Use hand drawn assets in my own art style
   • Pixel art is fun too, but if I'm working on my digital painting skills, I might as well hit two birds with one stone
3. Prioritize smoothness
   • Controls should be fluid and responsive
   • Characters and objects should feel like they're part of the world, and not just sprites/frames
   • Objects should avoid teleporting during animations, and should be linearly interpolated between positions
4. Add complete effects
   • While some of my older games had visual effects, they often lacked sound
   • All effects (e.g. a dust cloud) should have a visual and audio component, and be wholly encapsulated such that they're easy to spawn in

I've addressed some of these in my first build above!

The terrain is made with connected tiles and is loosely inspired by the algae and shrimp soil in my own aquarium. My first simple "background" involves endlessly falling plant matter, moves with the player via motion parallax, and might be something I can tint for different biomes/times of day.

I'll do a write-up about how I've animated the player character's arms and torso in another post!

Tags: Blog, Tributary with Moons