Woah! I certainly never thought our first jam game would catch so many people's attention! Our team has had so much fun with this whole experience and to see that reciprocated by everyone playing our game has been so amazing. The kind words in the comments have made our weeks and we're really thankful to see such great feedback on Dream Reaper. To celebrate getting 50 ratings, I wanted to make a devlog showcasing Dream Reaper's visuals, which have shone through as one of the biggest draws of our game.
To begin, I want to show some of the placeholder assets we started with to show how much our artist, @Ratman, carried the visuals of the game. These were mostly used for testing, but were pretty much all of the visual direction we gave Ratman to work with and even for programmer art, they are pretty bad. Here's what they looked like:
As you can see, the final look of the game is a drastic improvement over these tiles:
The only thing in this that made it into the final game were the two tiles in the bottom left of the tileset, since they wound up working well with some of the walls Ratman made for us.
Speaking of things Ratman made, throughout the 72 hours of the jam, he made 3 57-tile tilesets, 12 sets of floor tiles (plus the clutter you see on them in the game), 143 frames of animation across 11 different sprites, and a beautiful title screen and logo, not to mention all the concept art that went into making them. Oh, and did I mention this was the first time Ratman has made art for a game? I think that is impressive in and of itself.
That being said, we didn't wind up using everything Ratman gave us. A bunch tilesets went unused and so did a bunch of animations. Among the things we cut were an animation for using the scythe and a scrapped item, Soul Food, which would have restored one charge of the player's phase meter when picked up. As to not let that work go to waste, here is what those would've looked like:
We had to cut both of these out for different reasons, the scythe swipe was cut due to time limitations and Soul Food wound up not being used in any of the levels we designed since it was added later on in development after the levels that made it into the game had been designed. If we decide to continue development on Dream Reaper after LD, we are going to be including both of these items, as well as a bunch of other things we scrapped like more enemies and different kinds of stage elements. I'd love to talk about those in another devlog if there's enough interest!
Once again, the reception we've gotten from everyone who's played Dream Reaper has been really heartwarming for all of us on the dev team. 50 ratings is significantly more than we thought we'd get and the feedback we have gotten has been so much more positive than we ever hoped to get. Thank you so much to everyone who's played so far (and thanks in advance to those who play in the future ;)).
If you haven't had a chance to play Dream Reaper yet, you can do so here. I do my best to read all the comments we get and play everyone's games, so if you haven't come by yet, or if you played without leaving a feedback, please do!
