Apotropaic Day 1 DevLog!

Hey y’all! This is Yousef, aka Gurin! I’m one of the gameplay programmers of Apotropaic!

I am really excited to get working on this game, as I never worked on a game of this style and mechanics before! 

We will be having a mix of 2D sprites and animations with 3D objects in a top-down view, kind of like Don’t Starve, so I am looking forward to experimenting with that.

We will be using Unity, so I am going to talk a bit about my plans to integrate the visuals.

The plan is to have a regular 3D world with 3D objects.

The main character and the enemies will all use 2D sprites and 2D animations, placed on top of invisible 3D objects that will be used for navigation and collision detection. For environment elements, they would have 2D textures with the same art style as the 2D sprites of the character, to keep the game’s art style coherent.

Since this game heavily relies on vision, the camera plays a very important role, as we would probably need to experiment with different angles to find something that works well with the gameplay and the art assets.

To have the sprites appear properly regardless how the camera is tilted, we would create a script that would have all sprites be parallel to the camera’s view.

One decent way to do that, is to have all the characters/enemies reference a scriptable object that has the data of the camera settings, which the gameplay camera would also reference; that way, changes will be done in a single place to tweak the angle, while not giving the sprites access to anything about the camera other than the angle they need to follow.

This is it for this DevLog, and I am looking forward to writing the next one!

To wrap it up, here’s a picture of my humble development setup!