I thought I would spend a bit of time in this next update talking about my approach to the art and design in the game, especially as I have been working on a few small pieces of concept art to illustrate what is next on my plate.

Design Process

First, let’s start with the design process.

In case anyone is wondering, I do not use any form of generative AI for creating content. That includes everything from in-game to concept art.

One of the key reasons I switched to game development as a career choice was to give myself an opportunity to get back into things I used to really enjoy prior to my career in Software. While I’m definitely not the best artist in the world, I always used to enjoy Design and CAD when I was at secondary school.

While I have plans to hire contractors to help take the artwork to the next level, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to improve my own skills over the past year and put together a process I’m happy with for getting content into the game.

Step 1 - Rough Sketch

I start with a rough sketch of what I want to build. Typically I do this in Procreate or Krita, depending if I’m using my iPad, Mac, or PC.

With characters I do a turnaround sheet, but so far I’ve only animated the 3/4 front view as it looks fairly decent for prototyping and demo work.

Step 2 - Raster to Vector

The rough sketch is then imported into Affinity where I turn it into a fully fledged piece of vector art.

Besides the sizing advantage of having a vector over a raster, it allows me to quickly make changes to colour and line strokes.

If the character/item is going to be animated, I’ll also organise it’s parts into layers (e.g., Head, Front Arm, Back Arm etc).

Step 3 - Animate in Spine

Once everything is neatly organised in my Affinity file, I slice it and export it as a Spine JSON.

This lets me easily import it into Spine2D, where I can then create skeletal rigs and meshes to let me animate it.

My skills in Spine are still very amateurish, but I’ve been enjoying it a lot and it’s one of the areas I’m currently focussed on improving.

Donation Preparation

In the early concept demo I showed a few weeks ago, there is a very basic gameplay loop where the main activities the player performs are:

1. Restocking mannequins from donation boxes
2. Serving customers
3. Replacing baskets

I kept this simple to try and help me nail down the core parts of the game would be.

However, since last month I’ve been looking at enhancing this with a bit more complexity.

Back in March, my original idea was you’d come into the store and sort the donations at the start of the day, but when play testing that idea, it never seemed to feel right with myself or other people.

The juxtaposition of starting with a thought puzzle against a time pressure activity game never seemed to work.

So instead, I’ve started designing and prototyping the donation sorting as part of the gameplay when serving customers.

Step 1 - Mannequins Require Stocking

In the early concept demo, Mannequins simply required a single “Donation” to be brought to them from a cardboard box.

Instead, I’m thinking of enhancing this with something similar to Overcooked, where Mannequins require a certain combination of donations to remain happy.

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Step 2 - Sourcing Donations

Rather than one source of donations, we now have three separate boxes that the player has to visit.

Right now, they can be thought of as an unlimited supply, but I have plans to experiment with restrictions or negative effects if too many items are left about the store.

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Step 3 - Cleaning Station

Prior to dressing the Mannequin, donations have to be cleaned.

The idea is you have to gather your donations and place them onto the cleaning station before transporting it to the mannequin.

1 - Place donations on clothes stand

2 - Spray clothes with a healthy dose of steam

3 - Admire your clean clothes

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Step 4a - Dress in Time, Happy Mannequin

Once the clothes are cleaned, you can then move them onto the mannequin, keeping it inert and happy.

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Step 4b - Too Slow, Hunting Mannequin

However, take too long and the mannequin moves into a hunting stage, where it attacks shoppers for their clothing instead, with escalating levels of threats.

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Rogue Based Character Selection

As mentioned in my previous post, one of the ideas I’ve been keen to explore is the concept of a roguelike class system.

One of the conceptual problems I’ve struggled with is the main character. For a long time I was assuming you’d play as the manager of the store, going in each day to serve customers.

However, that has problems because one of the key parts to a roguelike game is the permadeath of a character.

There are ways it could be handled, especially as the game already has supernatural elements in it, but it felt like a bit of a cop-out if you end up just being resurrected.

Instead, I’ve been experimenting with the concept that you play as two characters instead:

• The Charity Manager for the long-term strategic/narrative part of the game
• A Volunteer for the day-to-day shifts, for as long as you can survive them

This feels a lot cleaner and sympathetic to the Charity Store angle the game is based on.

It also just so happens to give rise to class based mechanics similar to Rogue Legacy.

For example, you could have:

• A retired librarian with the unique ability to sush threats into silence
• An out of work thespian who can heal the bravery of your shoppers with a short inspiring monologue

To tie this into the game loop, I’ve built a small prototype where you as the Manager are in control of the shops hiring and upgrades from a suitable Desktop PC.

New Logo

I thought it might also be worth pointing out that Ashpaw Games has a new Logo Design.

The original logo wasn’t terrible, but I needed something that would be easier to use for marketing purposes.

That’s led me to convert it into a stylized vector illustration which is a lot easier to resize and adjust as needed.

Next Up

Given all the work I’ve done over the past few weeks on designs, I’m now starting to put some of it in the game so I can start to test whether the addition to the loops makes the game more fun.

I’m also starting to play around with the Camera angle. “Almost Isometric” looks great, but makes the art work a lot more difficult. As I want to carry on speeding up the development process, I’m thinking about experimenting with a straight looking top-down view, at least for the parts of the game where 2D prop interaction is needed.

Finally, I also need to have a think about the name of the game. Community Spirit has been a placeholder as it does a good job at describing its nature, but is a poor choice for marketing and trademark reasons. I have a few ideas I’m starting to warm to, but it’s still early days yet.

Until next time,

Tom