hi, its austin. thanksgiving time with friends and family! not much development has happened this past week.

this post i wanted to show some old character sprites. i also wanted to show how things have changed visually with the game over time.

ananke and thoth are from my digital comic burial. burial was a short, incomplete story about criminal wizards on the run from the developed world. when i was first making Checkmage!, its internal name was wizard chess, and thought it was a fun idea to have them cameo as students.

thoth's magical "theme" was precision and planning, while ananke's was of destruction and inevitability. ive tried to keep these themes intact in their chess loadouts for some reason. maybe it matters to me that i keep these characters true to their source?

scott and asha are characters from an unrealized game jusentari and i had planned to make when we were younger. i took their names and gave them to some similar characters, so that if the original game never gets created, at least some semblance of them exist in a completed project. in these small ways, i promise to myself i have to finish checkmage.

these other sprites i felt were interesting enough to share, just some pixel art that didnt fully make the cut.

the grotto is one of the first places i wanted to design. the scope of the game was much smaller back then, and i didn't have much experience with level design. i didn't even know how to decorate a room in real life, let alone design one from scratch! i thought the grotto would be a good starting place, as it could be a grimy little cave for a bunch of druids who were one with the earth.





you can see here just how significantly the scope of the game has increased. the stages became more detailed and increased in size considerably. this was an attempt to lend some personality to where the characters choose to spend their time. this incurred a large cost in terms of development time, so i hope it's worth it in the end!

the progress of the level select map. i think i wanted a more tile-map style grid but i ended up drawing most of it by hand.

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  - play the demo now!

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