Holy cow it's been a while! We've been in the depths of wrangling the new art style. We finally got a new look for the main hub, no to mention the enemies!  There are still a lot of animations we're missing, but I'm so damn proud of what we have that I couldn't wait to share.

I spent a long time trying to make my roughly 7 year old code play nice with the new art. I started this project when I was first learning how to program, and didn't really care about the art. The pathfinding AI is based on 64x64 pixel tiles, and the character art is scaled up by 3 on screen instead of zooming the camera in. The character art scaled up by 3, but the environment art was natively 64x64, not scaled at all. So when it came time for our new environment artist to make assets, there was some serious head scratching about how to reconcile the resolution differences.  64 does not divide cleanly by 3! What are we going to do?? 

I didn't want to sacrifice my finely tuned gamefeel, the one aspect I've poured more time into and gotten more praise for than any other in Punchy by changing the size of the character art. But it seemed to be the only way. We started scaling characters up by 4 so that the environment could be based on 16x16 tiles, scaled up by 4 to be the 64x64 blocks we needed. 

This immediately destroyed the gamefeel. Everyone was bigger, so the movement felt much slower.  The knockback was less impactful.  You didn't throw as hard. It was all off! I thought it would take forever to bring back the juice levels of the previous version, but I put the time in. And honestly, I'm not entirely sure I have succeeded. Does it feel good to play? Yes. Does it have the same level of fluidity as the previous build? It's hard for me to say. I'm too deep in it to have that perspective. But I'm happy with it for now.

Anyway, we also have an actual environment artists working with us! His name is Matheus and he's sick! We've been reworking the main hub of the game to be a '90s style youth center, and he is totally nailing the aesthetic. This new build features a WIP version, which doesn't perfectly line up with our grid yet, but again, I'm just so damn proud that I wanted to show it off anyway. It should give you a good sense of how the rest of the game will look.

There's also a small palette of skin tones available for the player character.  We plan to expand this list in the future. 

And by the way, if you got the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, then own our previous game,Eves Drop! It's a bite-sized cyberpunk rouglite with intense speed and visuals :)

We should be posting updates more regularly again.  Thanks for your support!

-Drew