This week has been an exciting one for me because I'm excited to announce another artist being added to the Bloodmoon Survivors roster! While Ref has been cooking up pixel art, I have been searching for an illustrator that has experience crafting Capsule art for the Steam store page that will be coming soon.  I'm happy to announce that I've commissioned art from Bruno Barros to help in that department: https://www.artstation.com/brunofbarros

Finding a Capsule Artist

Since this is a long format discussion, I think I want to start by explaining my process for acquiring an artist for the commission.  I feel this is important to share because before starting I had no idea how to find a good artist or decide if they would be a good fit for my type of game.  According to Chris Zukalous, https://howtomarketagame.com/2020/04/13/how-one-new-image-increased-sales-by-20x..., a good capsule art piece is like a YouTube thumbnail, it is one of the most important pieces of art in your entire game, and is literally the button that drives click-through rate on Steam, so finding someone who is capable of creating a solid piece is very important.

I suppose you could say I started my search by generating a reference image for the art using Midjourney.  Although I want to make clear that I will not use AI art in the final version of my game, it has been a very helpful tool in figuring out exactly what I want to make.  It is the placeholder piece in my itch.io page and the main menu of Bloodmoon survivors.  It took me about 4 hours to get the prompt right and nail down exactly what I want from the piece in terms of color palette and layout.  

After generating the reference art I spent some time looking at pieces with a similar color palette and tone on steam from SUCCESSFUL games or games with a lot of wish lists.  The art piece that stuck out to me the most was for the upcoming game, Avowed, from Obsidian Entertainment.  There is something striking about how it takes the classic skeleton enemy character and reinvents it through a clever color palette, which seems to reflect the game's overall ideas and game play mechanics.

The last piece to preparing for my search was writing out a proposal for the art piece I wanted commissioned.  I knew that I would be asked for details and I wanted to come as prepared to the conversation as I possibly could be.  For reference, here is everything I wrote in my pitch.  Note, I also supplied all of the requirements that steam has for all of their graphical assets, I felt this would be useful for the artist to have upfront so there are no surprises about resizing and how the art would be used!

Finally, after getting all of my materials ready, I went to reddit and art station to find an artist. It took me a bit of digging to find artists who specialized in capsule art and also had prior experience creating artwork for steam, but finally I was able to find Bruno's page.  All of his portfolio pieces seemed to resonate with the style I was going for, and on request he provided prior capsule art that he created.  Needless to say I was happy with what I saw.  The cherry on top was that as he started blocking out the picture based on the reference image I provided and enemies from the game, he offered some improvements to the layout of the piece, which I feel were very good ideas.  I'm excited to see the picture come to life!

Ref continues cooking

While I've been looking for a capsule artist, Ref has continued to create excellent enemies and elites for the first 2 levels of the game.  We are getting close to finalizing the first 2 levels, which will be available in the demo, so we are switching gears to polishing instead of generating new content.  After finishing the final normal enemy for level 2, which is a cool mutated human that uses it's legs to jump on the player and cause a shockwave, I asked him to revisit the first level so we could start designing the elites!

(Level 2 Jumper mutant)

(Level 1 First Elite)

(Level 1 Second Elite)

The process for making Elite enemies has been a mixed bag so far.  The first enemy was literally created in one go. Everything from the design to his custom attacks just felt right on Ref's first attempt, and we were done within a day.  The second enemy took much longer to craft and nail down the design for.  I asked for multiple revisions because I was obsessed with the idea of pixelating the swap horse rider from Elden Ring.  I love the idea of a rider that's almost like a parasite to the horse, and I think Ref did a great job capturing that! I know it was no easy feat.

(Reference image for Elite 2)

Achievement System

From a programming standpoint, I'm excited to announce that I've made good strides in implementing an achievement system in the game! This was something I discovered was necessary after hours of playtesting and finding that the item and powerup unlock progression systems were uneven for players of varying skill.  Experienced vampire survivors players would unlock new weapons and levels and powerups within a single run of the game since they were bound to in-run quests, such as freeing survivors or collecting materials.  Other players who were newer to the game failed to complete those quests so they took much longer to start unlocking all the new weapons and other planned content.  To fix this, I found that the best solution would be tying the rewards system to meta-run progress, such as killing X enemies, or surviving X amount of time.  That way, as long as a player was still playing, I could guaranteed that they would be rewarded.

The UI is obviously a placeholder quest but the layout feels very effective to me.  The achievements track whatever stat they require in real time, and at the end of the run, the player is notified of everything they've unlocked.  I'm already starting to feel the benefits of this system as I playtest my own game due to the fact that I'll randomly unlock a new weapon during testing :)

I'm also very happy with how simple the architecture of the system is.  From a development standpoint it works in the following way:

• I create a generic AchievementHandler class whever I want to track a new variable.  For example, when the player kills an enemy I have the xKillsAchievementHandler increment its value which emits an On_AchievementProgress event.  
• Singleton AchievementManager, which listens for the On_AchievementProgress events coming in and updates a runtime dictionary of all achievements with the new progress being incremented
• Once an AchievementManager achievement reaches 100% complete, it sends out a separate event, On_AchievementCompleted that notifies the UI to show the player that they did something noteworthy.  It also stores the completed achievement until the end of the run
• End game: After a player survives the night or dies, we save all of the AchievementManager updates to existing achievements and trigger all of the completed achievements to unlock their corresponding rewards.  So far this is only new weapons and powerup trees, but the rewards can be anything, from extra money for other upgrades to weapon mastery bonuses (Which is another thing coming next week!)

Next Week

I feel like the game's development is truly firing on all fronts now.  The engine is roaring and all I have to do is keep shoveling rocket fuel into it's pistons (not a car mechanic clearly).  Next week I hope to:

• Solidify the core capsule art and logo design and look with Bruno
• Finish all of the Elite enemies for Level 1 and start on the Elites for Level 2 with Ref
• Finish implementing the Achievement System and add a ton of achievements to smooth out the reward progression curve for players of varying skill levels
• Start implementing a better tutorial experience for new players