hey!
thanks for reading!
here i am procrastinating on working on the soundtrack for skullheadworld by digging up some ancient screenshots of the game and vaguely explaining what is going on. the time machine is still set a couple years in the past.
by now there were all these cool procedural critters running around, bumping in to each other and knocking each other out. but it wasn't a game yet really. so, score and health was grudgingly added to the top right of the screen. i did not want any onscreen language, but needed something to make it feel more like a game- because it was getting close to time to show this weird bunch of psychedelic procedural nonsense to my videogame-making friends.
of course i had to make a little particle system for collision effects and go completely overboard with it.
the purple circles showing the damage zones for the weapons. just entering those circles when they were fully lit would trigger a hit and a procedural attack animation, and then they would recharge. there were no projectiles yet and even guns were very short range weapons.
something i haven't mentioned is that almost all of these old screenshots are of bugs, or issues i saw in the game.
in this one particle effects are also still using the standard unity sprite shader and are overpowering everything when they overlap.
damage effects were also colored to represent the health remaining- this made the screen look like a flashing stoplight and was eventually changed.
here the stretch millipedes are looking ridiculously long (but the joints are not as broken as a few photos back), and there is the first attempt at streaks and a giant sun in the background.
pretty soon i drew a nice blocky font and started showing a score in the corner. but deep down i wanted to keep hud and numbers out of the way of gameplay. you can see that eye color was being used to convey health. i preferred that sort of thing for this game.
looking at these old images makes me realize how unnecessary the iterations on the pupils that happened later were... but more abut that later.
jeremy