hi its austin, this week i worked on some fun things.

some time was spent on the profile screen.

the profile screen is a place to check out your stats & other progress through the game.

i drew lots of sprites for the main character! many of them are a lil rough around the edges still, but i'll polish those at a later point. the intent is to have a lot of customization options for the player, as they'll be staring at this little goblin whenever they're out of battle in the overworld. i'd prefer that people craft a character that is cute or represents them in some way.

(the eye color changer does nothing. its a gag that gets referenced by one character at one point in the game, only if it is changed by the player)

inspired by pokemon, you get to draw your signature (or any little bit of art) that gets saved to your profile. this has been in the game from a very early state because ive always liked giving people a way to express themselves through drawing.

you can also change your wizard title here, which you collect from defeating other students! 

i edit all the sprites for the game in aseprite. the most complicated set of sprites ive had to create are for the main character, and editing them in aseprite helps keep the layered sprite sheets organized and quick to iterate on.

i can really vouch for aseprite if youre looking to make pixel art. it has a lot of tools for pixel artists and low res digital art, and i even use it to touch up my larger artworks outside of Checkmage!

some pretty rough progress was made on the shopkeeper UI as well. i might scrap the coin visual for something more clear. a lot of the time in development i'm just stumbling around trying out new things i havent seen in many games before learning why things are done differently. usually, most games have it right and get the clunkiness and confusion-inducing elements of UI down to a minimum.

finally, i made some progress on the observatory area, and the game world is now large enough for me to justify including a sprint button.

it feels good!

Checkmage! is still in active development. If you want to support me, please consider sharing with friends. The game will be released on Steam and Itch for sale when I'm done making it.

Checkmage! on steam  - wishlist now!

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