![]() ![]() Over the years I've found programming to be most enjoyable when I'm building my own systems and learning how things work at a more fundamental level. What were some of the challenges of creating your own engine, and how did you look to push it into uncharted territory? You built Animal Well's engine from scratch to explore new pixel art styles and rendering techniques. I've been trying to challenge myself to make animations expressive in different ways. I see almost every indie game using these to make things look exciting andįun. Things like squash and stretch, and screen shake. There are also a bunch of popular Animation Tips that I've been actively avoiding using. I'm also a programmer by trade, so doing things this way feels most natural for me. I try to have as many things be dynamic like that. They are all following their own slightly different paths as the creature follows the player, causing the body to stretch and bend in very unnatural ways. For instance with the Ghost Cat in the trailer, all the limbs are animated independently through code, along with multiple segments for the body. #8 bit art view point code#I think having code drive animations often makes things look uncanny. So a lot of animation gets created in a tight iteration loop of "creative coding."Īs far as making them unsettling, I think the procedural aspects play a big part in that. Also, early on, I structured the engine so all the gameplay code is in it's own DLL, and it can be recompiled at any time, while Usually when I'm animating a character I use a mix of all those things. I've also added a lot of functionalityįor particle effects and procedurally drawing geometry. Since then I've added the ability to ingest data from Aseprite, which is the program I currently use to do traditional 2D animation. Were very basic, and sprite strips were just drawn directly on the sheet in photoshop. I have every sprite in the game on one giant sprite sheet, and very early on, I was manually defining them all by entering the UV coordinates straight into C++ code. In Animal Well were sort of developed alongside the game's engine. There's no doubting the versatility of the aesthetic at this point, but Animal Well's combination of lucid animation and fizzing visuals delivers something that feels raw and evocative.ĭrunk on that beguiling, heady cocktail, I caught up with Basso to learn how he's using an engine made entirely from scratch to breathe life into his freakish, enthralling, and slightly terrifying adventure.ĭid you develop and hone your animation techniques to make the denizens of Animal Well so brilliantly unsettling? When I first locked eyes on the indie title during the recent PS Indies showcase, I was taken by how much detail and flavor had been crammed into its pixel art world. Creatures of unknown intent wondering how best to deal with the interloper fumbling through their forsaken domain. But there are terrors lurking in the dark. Environments pulsate and glow with an otherworldly verve, bursting into life as players attempt to unlock the secrets of the unfamiliar puzzle box they now inhabit. ![]() In the dense, pixel art labyrinth that spilled from the mind of sole developer Billy Basso there is beauty and danger in equal measure. ![]()
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