Overview

Hello and welcome to the first devlog for Nekrolith. Nekrolith is a dark fantasy action RPG with rogue-lite elements. In this devlog, we will review our process for setting up a basic test scene in the game.

The purpose of the scene will be to have an interesting background against which to develop basic game mechanics.

Additionally, it will help us establish a pipeline for developing visual assets and exploring art styles.

Scene Location

One of the toughest things this early in the project was deciding on the location for the test scene. In the end I decided to go with the Cultist's Hideout, an early game location which will be used as a tutorial area in the final version of the game.

Mixed Media Pipeline

Though I did draw during my high school days, I had not used digital media until very recently and I still find it difficult to sketch using a wacom tablet. Thus, I decided to adopt a pipeline that starts with pencils on paper and then import into clip studio paint for inking and coloring.

I'm still not sure if it's best to ink using fine liners on paper and then color digitally or if it's best to ink digitally as well. At the moment I've decided to go with inking digitally due to the higher quality even though it tends to take much longer.

Unique Modular Assets

Being a solo dev, I'm interested in finding the most optimal way to create assets and build scenes in the game. I did want, however, to ensure that the game had a unique art style and mood. Thus, I've decided to go with my own hand-drawn assets, but will do so in a way that promotes re-use without obvious repetition.

There are some drawbacks to this approach but it does seem to be the best way forward, especially with the rogue-lite aspects that I'm planning to add to the game.

Once I had a nice set of unique assets, I found that it was very easy to build prefabs in unity and was still able to re-use several assets via color changes, alpha, and size modifications.

A Tour of the sample test scene

You can see the resulting scene here:

Now we can focus for a bit on characters and game mechanics and will be coming back to environments once we've got a closed game loop in the coming months

Please tell me what you think! I always appreciate feedback and any suggestions the indie dev community might have!