[Game Asset] My Pixel Art Spaceships Pack is now on Itch.io

I decided to give Itch.io another try and uploaded my pixel art spaceships pack there. Previously, I uploaded my Futuristic 2D Sprite Kit but sales were non-existent. One thing I did differently this time was to spice up the page with nicer backgrounds and banners.

Hopefully the pixel art spaceships pack will fare better this time.

[Game Asset] Pixel Art Spaceships For SHMUP


About two weeks ago, I released my second game asset “Pixel Art Spaceships For SHMUP” on both GameDevMarket and Scirra Store. I’m happy to say that the response for this asset has been great and I’m currently working on adding more ships to the pack soon.

Asset Contents

  • 28 small spaceships (within 48 x 48 pixels)
  • 5 large spaceships (within 128 x 128 pixels)
  • Comes in both .PSD and .PNG format

If you have already purchased Pixel Art Spaceships For SHMUP, thank you so much for your support. Look forward to more game assets in the near future.

Body chan For Manga Artists, Is It Worth Buying?

livingtheindie body-chan header

When it comes to drawing characters, I usually have a hard time getting their poses right. It’s either the body proportion is off or the outcome just look unnatural.  Imagine my surprise when I came across Body-chan by SH Figuarts for the first time while browsing around my local game & figurine store.

For those who are unfamiliar with this product, body-chan is a poseable figure released by Bandai. The one that I have here is the female Pale Orange DX version, which comes with more accessories (17 different hand poses, laptop, tablet, flip phone, touch phone, pen, gun and a katana sword). This is definitely a better choice compared to the none DX version which only includes 10 interchangeable hands and no other accessories. There is also a male variation called Body-kun.

The build quality of the figurine is excellent and as you can see from the pictures above, the joints are pretty flexible. There are of course, a limit to how much you can bend the arms and legs which may make certain poses difficult to pull off. However I find those limitations to be few and far between.

To demonstrate the usage of body chan, here’s a short video of me using one of the poses as a template to draw Vicky, a character from my game Def-Op: Codename I.R.I.S.

 

If you are looking to improve your character drawings, body-chan by Bandai SH Figuarts is definitely worth buying. Before this I had to do a lot of re-sketching because I couldn’t get the pose I wanted, leading to some stressful moments. With body-chan, I can just set it up, snap a picture and off I go to my iPad (that’s where I do most of my artwork).

You can purchase SH Figurarts Body-chan DX over at Amazon [affiliate link]

Updates And A New Web Game In Development

For the past few of months I have been working on a new project (none gaming related), which explains the lack of updates between July and now. Thankfully that other project has since settled down a little, allowing me put some focus back onto game development.

 

I recently purchased Gamemaker Studio 1.4 from Humble Bundle and decided to give it a try. Starting off fresh on a new SDK is tough and I struggled at the beginning. As always, going through the tutorials is the easy the part. The hard part is when you try to implement your own gameplay elements into your game. To be honest, there were times I wanted to just give up and go back to things I’m familiar with but thankfully I managed to hang on and continued working on it.

 

I don’t have much to show at the moment but it’s basically another twist to the defense game genre. Hoping to get this up and running around next month November. Here’s a very early screenshot of the game with placeholder graphics.

 

My very early WIP game

 

On another note, I have also uploaded my previous game DefOp: Codename I.R.I.S Dual Blaster on this site. It was originally submitted to Scirra Arcade (the folks that made Construct2 ) with over 4000 plays, which is pretty awesome. Check it out if you are interested.

 

Def-Op : Codename I.R.I.S version 1.0.6 Devlog

I’m happy to announce that Def-Op : Codename I.R.I.S version 1.0.6 is now out on the Appstore. This update is mostly under-the-hood optimizations and bug fixes, along with some graphical upgrades. I will go through some of the key changes below.

Name Change

First and foremost, the game’s name has been changed from I.R.I.S – DefOp to Def-Op: Codename I.R.I.S. The reason behind the original name is that I wanted I.R.I.S to be the base name for subsequent games that were to follow (e.g I.R.I.S – <sub title 01>, I.R.I.S – <sub title 02>. As time I passes, I realised that I.R.I.S isn’t exactly memorable nor does it do well in search rankings (as pointed out by a fellow game dev). With that, I decided to switch the name around.

Right Gate Fix

When the left beam gate is activated, there’s a random chance that the right gate will not work. This results in some frustrating situations where the enemies will slip right past. This issue is now fixed in the latest release.

Improved Summary Screen

In the previous version, the summary screen consists mostly text explaining the situation surrounding the main character Erika. While it gets the message across, the overall feel of that screen seems dull. In 1.0.6, I added some illustrations and split the summary text into 3 pages.

Improved Menu 

It is much easier to navigate through the menu now compared to version 1.0.5, with buttons clearly labeled and the designs standardized.

Minor Graphical Upgrades

I redrew Erika’s portrait as I felt the original wasn’t that great looking. Some facial expressions looked really odd as well. Apart from that, enemies now have shadows beneath them and I’ve changed one of the explosion animations.

That’s about covers it for version 1.0.6. If you have played this game, feel free to leave any comments or suggestions. If you enjoyed, be sure to give it a rating on the Appstore. It really helps me out as an indie developer. Thanks!