Blog

It's been half a year of a mixture of part-time and full-time solo development and I am happy to announce the alpha release of Draft of Darkness! It's a mixture of many genres, so it's a little hard to explain in short. Draft of Darkness is a roguelike card game inspired by Slay The Spire, and adds dungeon crawling and resource management in a post-apocalyptic setting. It has a dystopian branching story where it's possible to get different endings for each run.

From the start, I've been planning to use bone animation for Absent Life, since weighted bone animations can generally look really good, even when animating a single piece sprite. All you have to do is spend time and assign bone weights to appropriate parts of your sprite.

Unfortunately, for pixel art this was seemingly not the picture. Although it may be fine on characters with small pixels and/or slim limbs, it is not generally highly regarded since it ruins the pixel-perfect nature of the graphics. Using weights is even worse since it distorts the individual pixels. Of course, it is all a matter of style and I wanted to try it out nevertheless.

In parallel to the 3D horror game "Duty Bound" that I had been working on, I started a new project. This new game, called "Absent Life" has now become my current focus. It's a 2D horror-themed card game, where rogue-like card combat aspects are inspired by the well-known game Slay The Spire. For now, the development for Duty Bound is on hold.

Absent Life's lore will be parallel to the one that I have been constructing for a while, which I used in one of my previous games, Heroes After The Fall. It will be set in a post-apocalyptic universe. I will be explaining more of the story later on -when I add the game page to the website- but I can say that a lot of the setting and enemies etc. will be very similar to Heroes After The Fall. Of course, that game will look very basic compared to what Absent Life will be.