I'm actually so insanely proud of how far I've come in pixel art and I get to show it off a bit in FORGE v2. To the left and in the middle are FORGE's old trees and to the right is one of the new ones!
New Sprite Kits
For v2, I've switched up how I'm building assets quite a bit. Since I know I can get away with a whole bunch of things, things like trees and foliage are modular, they're clusters of assets where I can animate and manipulate things pretty granularly without a gigantic sprite sheet.
In earlier versions, there were a lot of inconsistent trees with inconsistent lighting (Is the light source from above??? Or from the side??? Why is it both??) This primarily was because I didn't take the time to standardize the assets but needed variance. I slapped a shader on the entire tree to make it seem like it was moving.
3D Audio?!
I can't really describe it to you - you'll need to play the demo at the end of November - but I figured out how to configure 3D audio in a 2D space and have some pretty cool soundscapes in Corel Village now!
What's next?
I'm pretty close to implementing woodworking with a new Mill UI and updating the player chopping animations. I'm overall really happy with the updated direction the art is going and am glad things are starting to sort of come together. It feels like I successfully captured the feeling of v1's movement and interactions and feel much better knowing that the underlying systems are actually properly and well-built.