So this last month or so of work on Fully Dogomatic has been mostly spent trying to figure out the direction the full release will take. Obviously it needs to be bigger and more fleshing out, but I've been trying to find out what will make it special and stand out from the crowd of other auto-shooters.

I began by creating a new art style and new art assets for everything in the game. This is probably what I spent the most time doing and by the time I had fully converted the game to the new style reactions to it were mixed. I was happy with how it turned out in a lot of ways, but by adding more detail, it only seemed to make it feel like more was missing. And most of all, it took away from the charm and personality of the original style. I went back and forth on it for a long time, but I finally decided to go back to the original style.

Here's a pick of some of the assets. I really liked the guns and the color palette but in the end I would have had to added so many more details and assets to make it feel right, it didn't feel worth it.

So here’s how it looks now, not much different from the version:

But there is one major difference: the color now come from a shaded instead of the sprites themselves. So while the game looks blue and orange, the sprite sheets look like this:

Why would I go through all the work to recollect every sprite in the game just to change it back with a shader? There’s two main reasons. 1) I want the freedom to change the color palette quickly without having to open every sprite file in Aseprite and change the color manually. 2) Because I love how Downwell lets you unlock color palettes and I’m a dirty thief. With such a small color palette, why not make a variety of color palettes to unlock? 

What the shader does is take a png file with two rows of colors, the top being the base sprite color, and the bottom being the new desired color, and it simply swaps the top color for the bottom in your sprite. So if I give it this palette:

I end up with the game looking like this:

Here's a link to the shader: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/1444

Thanks for giving this devlog a read, I want to be more consistent in sharing progress with the game going forward so expect more to come soon! Also consider following me on Twitter to see more about development.