You make friends with aliens and create the universe, while discovering it's secrets.
Just me, Ditto. I'm good at the programmings and the drawing of aliens.
So when are you gonna be updating this devlog here?
Whenever there's something to say I guess? Please give suggestions if there's something you want me to talk a bit about!
Wow I wish I could create planets RIGHT NOW!
There's nothing to do besides spawning planets, but hey, that's what you wanted to do, right?
Love the art style, like a kid's imagination come to life.
What kind of mechanics do you have in mind?
I started working on this game during the Global Game Jam in February. It was held at a public museum where random people would come and watch/playtest. I had a BUNCH of kids play the game, so I think I started to make this for them!
About the mechanics: the different aliens you meet and gather to your little party are gonna have some different abilities. Right now we have the recruiter and lifter. You'll meet aliens that want your help, maybe it's their friends gone missing and you have to find them, or chasing away bullies from a planet ? Haven't really figured this part out! We'll see what happens!
I'm so used to creating games about guns and explosions, so it's a cool design challenge to make a game about ... friendship?
Oh DUDE! I saw this on twitter not too long ago! Glad to see you're making a devlog.
Art style is fantastic. So colorful, bouncy and just overall pleasant to look at. Stoked to see where you take the gameplay!
This artstyle is gorgeous. Keep it up!
Yay! Saw you on Twitter (and followed*) just the other day. You should post that tower of creatures on here too. This game seems really rad (and cute!).
* Or so I thought! Fixed now!
Haha yeah I should, I'm a bit confused about posting gifs though! I have uploaded them to imgur and then put the link in the image tags when I post here, is that the way to go? Is there an easier way?
That's how you do it (image uploading/posting).
Haha that tower of dudes is awesome.
Replying to watch. Looks lovely!
Are they only called aliens when they aren't on their home planets? Hmmmmmm, what's the deal? Do they even have home planets?
Also saw this on Twitter a while ago and loved what I saw. Insta-follow!
Saw you on Twitter and followed. I simply adore the simplistic art style and animation!
The whole concept and execution has a charming quirkiness about it.
This is awesome, when will we get a demo.
So, there's planets in the game! "What goes into creating a planet?" no one asked. Well, let me tell you!
First off, you throw an orb on the ground. As it bounces into space, we start checking whether it's position is distant enough from the other planets to create a new planet of minimum size. If it IS in free space, it expands the size of the new planet as long as it still fits.
Now we decide the color scheme of the planet. We first decide on a random color as a base. Watch the color schemes of the planets below, notice how they shift from red to purple, to blue and so on, that's the basecolor. Let's say we picked red, that means the trees and junk on the planet are going to have a color close to red. We do this through a bit of programmer magic where we say "Hey, make this tree in a color close to red, and then make the trunk color even more offset from red to create some nice contrasts!".
I also use the color for a trick that makes the colors come together a bit more nicely. I put a layer on top of everything in the game, with low opacity. This makes, at least to me, the colors look like they belong together in a nice way.
We know the colors now, which means we'll get on to deciding what TYPE of planet we're spawning. This will be important in the game, but right now it's purely cosmetic. The type of the planet determines what stuff we put on the planets surface. Should we put pinetrees, mushrooms or maybe a tombstone there eh? What type of planet that spawns is going to be controlled by the player, but right now it's completely random.
Lastly we fill the planets surface with a bunch of stuff. I've drawn loads of different trees, rocks, bushes and what not, which I've grouped into different sets for different planet types. We then create all this stuff a bit away from the planet, then pull it towards the surface, to get that cool spawning animation!