Behind the stage

I'm desgining my graphical elements with Inkscape, which is a great, great tool. Here is an example with some concept art of the forest level... black platforms, blurred elements on the baground, glows, gradients... Really some effort is needed to make an appealing visual style...

For development I use Godot, which is a game-development engine: OpenSource , under the MIT licence and... supercool !! It has been released earlier this year in open source and this then the developement seems to go superfast. I'm very confident that it will very soon, in a year or so, compete favorably with Unity.

Here is a small snapshot of LittleShadows developement with Godot (you may notice that I'm using godot in Unity, but that's only my distro's name... :-) )
Setting the stage...

Setting up collision polygons to avoid interpenetrations

Adding few elements (trees, glows) to make the stuff a little more fancy...

First ScreenCast...

I guess that the design will change a lot, but I like this atmosphere... Many details are wrong (the little girl is more sliding than walking, collision boxes aren't perfect, gameplay is ... which gameplay?), but it just give a rough idea of what I want to do.

First concept art

I spit-designed (thanks Inkscape) some elements setting up the atmosphere a little bit...

The same, but with additional textures

Blog launch !

As soon I got my first NES, I wanted to create my own video games. I was around the age of 10, and I was drawing scrollable backgrounds (I guess it was just while playing 'the Adams Family' title). But I was missing the skills at that time, neither able to design or code anything, so my dream was hardly possible to come true.

Twenty three years laters, I am a professional programmer with a background in mathematical modeling of mechanical deformations, with a good job that I love and which challenges me. But I miss the creativity fun I had when designing the backgrounds of my ideal games.

So I decided to create my own platform game. Inspired a little bit (very much indeed) by 

Shadowplay: Journey to Wonderland, 

Limbo, 

and Outland 

but all those games were created by teams of skilled people... So, I just hope to create something nice that some people will like... and I'll work as hard as hell for that. This blog is the story of this amazing journey.