Lands of Treasure - 2D (pixel art) Action/Adventure RPG

Hello everyone

A while back I started doing some tests with the new Sprite system in Unity, mainly to see if it's possible to make a game with pixel art graphics, 100% pixel-perfect, and scalable so the higher the resolution, the bigger the pixels. I managed to get it working really nicely (unless the scale factor is non-integer).

The game will be about exploring locations, fighting enemies, solving puzzles, searching for clues and collecting valuable treasure. Battles will be real-time as in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past but unlike that game there will also be some RPG elements.

The past few days I've been working on a basic character (not necessarily the player character), with a walk cycle in 8 directions, 4 frames each. I also put together a small location to walk around in, using some tiles I did a while ago and some other very quickly drawn ones, these are all placeholders

You can try my first little demo here: http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure/

You can walk around using the arrow keys and well... that's all you can do for now ^^'

In the coming days I'll think some more about the story/gameplay and make some UI designs,...

That's all for now, thanks for reading and have a nice day!

UPDATE - Current look:

 

It's nice to see a new game like the old ones

Keep it up !

 

Thank you very much!

I'll do my best

 

This brings back lots of fond memories : D
Looking awesome so far!

 

Thank you very much Glad you like the graphics so far It's all work in progress at the moment, I want to add some shading to the black outline of the character so it's not 100% black but a dark shade of the color it is surrounding

 

Looking pretty amazing so far! I can only imagine how hard it must be to animate a walk cycle in that many directions

 

Thanks

It did take some time to get right Especially cause I keep changing pixels around until it's "perfect" (which it never is ^^'). It's still not completely right at the moment but I'll fix that when I make the actual player characters There are actually only 5 directions Up, Down, Left-up, Left and Left-down The other ones are mirrored

 

I really like the character art and animation. Lookin' good so far!

 

Thank you very much I think I'll be doing some more pixel art of the 2 main characters (male and female) in the coming days, so look forward to that

 

Super small update for today:

At the moment I see this game to be mainly about exploring, solving puzzles and finding treasure. There will be fighting too but just like in Zelda is will be mainly about having different weapons to fight with, but not too much other equipment like helmets, gauntlets, armor,... I do want the player to be able to customize their character a bit so I think I'll add the option at the start of the game to change the colors of your clothes and hair (maybe skin and eye color too).

So that's what I tried this evening, added the turnaround of my character to the test level and write a script to change the color of the character's shirt.

This little test is currently not in the demo, it will be added again later

 

Haven't been able to do a lot of programming this weekend...

I was able to add my item pick up system
In the game you will be able to take an item by just standing in front of it and pressing X, but what if there are a lot of objects close together and you want to pick up a specific one, you can press and hold S to make a cursor appear that you can move around with the arrow keys. Move it to the specific item you want to pick up and press X as before. Releasing S will let you walk around again with your character

Try it out in a little demo: http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure/

 

Very nice, it reminds me of Harvest moon and dragon quest

 

@KirbyRawr: Thank you very much I loved Harvest moon on Game Boy back in the day I think I'll add the ability to run like in those games

Currently I'm thinking about the design for the male character, I already have a female character but I want to finish the male too before showing them off

 

i love it! i hope to see it down the line

 

Thanks I'll do my best

 

Realy nice idea with pick up system

 

Thanks thought of this idea back in 2010 but never used it ^^'

I've been working on a pixel font sprite sheet yesterday Will now program a system to display a string with it. I'll add a little test of it in my current webplayer demo, I'll display some text when you are in front of an object

A friend is helping me with the male character design I'll be able to show you both male and female very soon

 

Some text has been added in the webplayer demo http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure/

Here's the font I made It's small but still perfectly readable in my opinion (I hope you guys think so too):

 

Looking good thus far! Definitely on my list of indie games to follow! Keep up the great work man.

 

Love it, great artwork aswell!

 

@AaronVictoria: Thank you very much Comments like these really motivate me to continue and make my game as awesome as possible

@levoTNTO: Heel erg bedankt!

 

Reminds me of habbo hotel with the art style nice demo works pretty much perfectly

 

Thanks Yeah, it's pixel art, just like Habbo Hotel but my game is not symmetric

I just got the line drawing of the male character If you guys would like it I could already show off line drawings of the male and female character Or I could just wait till the male is also colored. The colors will be the default ones but in the game you will be able to adjust them of your hair, eyes, clothes,...

 

Hey guys, got something new to show you

Inspired by http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/22...rogres/page2?p=1529557&viewfull=1#post1529557 (Another pixel art game by BKacz) I did some work on a lighting system I thought about a while ago. I didn't want to use lights from unity cause I think smooth lighting doesn't really fit the retro style of my game so I went for something different, and I hope you like it:



Of course you can also take a look at it yourself in the updated web player: http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure/

 

Realy awsome, with this kind of lighting your game can be extended with looking for some tresures in the night or dungeon . You used a cookie with point light am i right ? or other solution that i can't think of right now

 

Thanks Glad you like it Yes, I want to do that when it is night you need a torch to light the way, and in villages you will have some of these smaller light circles around windows, and other people walking around at night

But no, I'm not using cookies I don't even know if it would be possible that way, I'm actually using GetPixel, SetPixel and Apply on an overlay sprite , drawing the light circles each frame ^^' Normally those functions are slow but because my resolution is so low (only 320x180), it runs really nicely I'm at 5 drawcalls atm and 0.6ms per frame

 

Looks like it could be quite fun, however for some reason I get a ton of lag, literally like 3 FPS. I think it's time to get a new PC. I like the art style a lot, though.

 

Glad you like it ^_^ But lag is not good Can you tell me the specs of your computer? Do you have lag in other Unity games too?

 

Not really noticed lag in any other games on Unity. I'll quickly try it again and tell you if it was a one off or not.

 

Definitely not a one off. Tried it 3 more times and still lag. I wouldn't say it is much to worry about, my computer can't run Morrowind (a 2002 game, in case you don't know about it) MGSO without only getting 11 FPS on average.

 

Do you perhaps have any specific specs? Like what's your CPU and speed, and do you have any graphics card (or is it an onboard intel media accelerator),...

I just made a change to the webplayer, could you try it again and tell me how it runs now? http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure/

 

No lag whatsoever now. I have a Radeon graphics card, so it's pretty bad. I'll post my specs in a sec.

 

Great I'm now only updating the lighting every 3 frames instead of every frame Changed it to 2 now Can you see if the framerate is still acceptable now? http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure/

 

Pretty much the same as before, no lag.

 

Awesome And it still looks fine, with once every 3 frames you started to see the light circles shake a bit when you move around ^^'
Thank you very much for the help

 

Specs:

Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7520G
RAM: 6GB
Dual-Core
Windows 8.1

 

No problem. I guess.

 

As announced before, I will reveal the characters of my game now

Siege and Lena - Designed by me, drawn by Sarah Stowasser​

They are called Siege (boy) and Lena (girl), but you will be able able to pick a name yourself in the game
For now I show you the line drawings, I will post a colored version later In the game, you will be able to change the colors of your hair, eyes and clothes so the "official" colors aren't that important

Special thanks to my super talented friend Sarah Stowasser for helping me visualize my designs See more of her work here: http://www.sarahstowasser.com/

That's all for now Hope you like the designs! Feel free to leave a comment

 

This is looking really good! I really like the light effect but one question. Do you have the light effect when it is day time? Also do you have to have a torch fr that light to show or is it always there?

 

Thank you very much The light effect is just a test for now I want to have a day and night system (maybe even a weather system?) in my game so during the day everything is bright, no light circles (or maybe just a little?) But when it gets darker, the light circles start to appear I could do that you always have a light circle around the hero, maybe a small one, and when you have a torch you get a big circle like it is in the little demo I'm not sure about these things yet ^^'

 

Sounds good I like the idea of you have a small light circle around your hero and if you have a torch then the circle is a lot bigger. If you need any help just PM me. I am not an artist but I do C# programming

 

I might also make it less dark cause maybe now it's a bit too dark ^^'
I'm both an artist (I've been drawing all my life) and also a programmer (learned C++ at school, and continued on my own to learn other languages like html/css/php/javascript/actionscript/C#/...) I won't be needing much help cause I love programming and I like challenging myself so I wouldn't want any help, hehe Thanks for the offer, though

 

Haven't been able to do much this week cause I've been a bit ill I did do some programming but nothing really new to show. I made the lighting effect class better so I can easily add lightsources (the lights in the current webplayer demo were hard coded). This weekend I hope to work a bit more on my UI system and maybe make some menus like an inventory so you can see those apples you picked up

 

Get well soon! Like many others have said, the retro graphics look great!

 

Thanks This weekend I've mainly been rewriting some of the code for the lighting system, it's not hard-coded anymore and now it's easy to dynamically create the light circles

Also wrote some code for the User Interface. At the moment I'm thinking of how The item/inventory system will work. In the past I always used the build in GUI system of Unity but it's not very optimized (it uses a drawcall for every GUITexture!) So now I'm using sprites I updated my webplayer demo but not much has changed visually except for a nicer (still wip) graphic for the "take item" text

http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure/

 

Little update to the demo: simple inventory system is working Press enter to show/hide it. take an item like before and it will appear in your in your inventory, when taking more apples they will automatically stack together and show a number to tell you how much you have. It's still very basic, I know ^^' Next step is to add some more different kind of items and make them all appear correctly and stacked in the inventory That'll be something for tomorrow



As always you can try out the demo here: http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure/

 

Just a critique. Imho... (Sorry for bad English)

I don't understand why yuo must press the "x" button to pick up items. I mean it should be more polite to just walk through the item and pick it automatically.

But... "x" would be useful if other items are "bad" things, for instance poison or thing like that. I mean something you shouldn't pick up for some reasons.

Or... you may add a crouch animation to use every time the player press "x".

I also believe making animations for each direction is annoying... But there's no alternative

Anyway, the inventory is working well.

 

The reason you have to press X (or A if it would be on a controller, going to add that later) is because I want it to be a bit like in Oblivion/Skyrim that you can take a lot of different items, and now the apples are lying on the ground but that's just a test, the items might be lying on a table or some other place you can't walk on.

I might add a simple animation of the character moving his hand forwards as if he's picking up an item, can't really make him crouch though cause as I already said, not all items will be lying on the ground.

Hehe, yes it is some more work (especially when I have to make the attack animation) but I think it's worth it cause it looks so much nicer when walking diagonally

Thank you very much for the feedback!

 

Another small update. Added 2 other test items (a stick and a cube). Also made the apple a bit smaller (still work in progress art) but added that the picture of the item in your inventory can be different, so there the apple is displayed bigger. Using the arrow keys you can now also select an item in your inventory, pressing X won't do anything (you can't eat the apple or do something with the other items yet) but you can press S to drop the item again in front of you

For now, when dropping an item you have more than one of, they will all be dropped as 1 item but it does remember it as multiple items (when walking up to it the text at the bottom left will say "Take Apple (5)" meaning that the one apple is actually 5 apples). Later on I will add that you can choose the amount you want to drop and add that you can also, instead of just dumping it in front of you, place it somewhere (Something like holding S for 1-2 seconds and the inventory will disappear and then you have the ability to move the item you just dropped around with your arrow keys and press X to place it at the chosen position. That's just an idea though, could be different when it turns out it doesn't work well this way).

I might move some code around now to clean everything up, after that I'll go into "artist mode" To update the male character to his new design I showed earlier and maybe also make the female character. Then I will also draw some nicer tiles for the world, some items and menu sprites. Especially the inventory system will need some work as it's very basic now, it will have more item slots and tabs for different categories of items (weapons, accessories, food, books, treasures,... something like that).

Anyway, the web build has been updated with the new changes I talked about so please check it out and give some feedback if you'd like

http://siegfriedcroes.com/landsoftreasure

 

Well done. I really like this kind of pixel art.
Even though this is a demo scene, it makes one want to go and explore immediately.

Instantly reminds me on great times with games a long time ago.

I've got a suggestion regarding the "bouncing" light though. Perhaps it is possible to make the animation slightly slower or tone it down a notch, I've noticed that it kind of makes me dizzy after staring at the screen for a while when standing still. But perhaps that's just me...