I spent last week refining the visual style of the game. The environment is going to be in the woods, so lot of nature elements. Accordingly I'm doing some experiments to make a good hero (the phantom). I thought of raccoon as a protagonist when I watched Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko on Netflix recently. Here's a scene I composed to test my environment ideas. Also drawing a cute raccoon character didn't take much time (about a day).

I also spent some time in trying out Unity's 2d animation packages to create my character rigs. However they turned out to be more of a hassle. The most important problem is while doing symmetric animations like walk or run cycles, I don't get mirror pose functionality with this package. In my home-grown animation solution, I've written a custom script to achieve this. It's a huge time saver and reduces lot of frustration. So I'm going to stick to my solution for character rigs.

I drew the new raccoon character in Krita, instead of Inkscape. I applied several techniques I learnt from drawing environment assets to make it pop-out. Without those techniques, the dark gray body of the character looks very flat and dull.

I've been playing Desperados-3 a lot too. I'm trying to solve all its missions without using guns. That's more likely how it will be in Phantom Behind. In fact a true stealth game mechanic shouldn't have weapons like guns. In fact, it's very likely that the Phantom won't be able to kill anyone, he can only knock them out, which will take that enemy unit out of action for certain time. However it's desirable to a player to permanently eliminate the enemy by killing them. Desperados has a really nice mechanic to achieve this by not killing. After knocking the enemy out you can tie them up and hide them into the bushes so that other enemy units don't spot and release them later. This permanently eliminates that enemy from interfering with the hero's tactics in future, yet it avoid killing. This goes hand-in-hand with my idea of a cute protagonist, like the raccoon here. (Only the raccoon is missing a tail for now, I'll add it soon)

Thought of this idea for a scene yesterday while walking through woods. Will see how to mingle it with gameplay later. The tree textures are not super good, but what do you think of the animation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4F_eY6O7-E

I spent last couple of days in Krita, learning different techniques to create nature themed sprites - trees, boulders, dirt. I also learnt to use some advanced 2D techniques in Unity - using URP, 2D lights, normal maps, Post processing. I'm also settling on the narrative theme of the world in which Phantom Behind takes place. Had some great discussion on Discord the other day on this topic.

Current status

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ0rXTPbJb8

I tried creating some artwork in Krita today. Then arranged it at different z-values with a perspective camera. Also you can see the seemless transition between separate characters and a composite character rig during kill.

Tried something new this morning. A more refined look and a better composed animation

The new Phantom now has two states: Standing and Crouching. The enemies have long view cones. Their view cones have two separate zones. If the phantom is in the outer zone of an enemy's view cone (marked with stripes), he will not be seen if he is crouching. The phantom will be detected and attacked if he is in the inner view cone, irrespective of standing or crouching. Also added animations for Sentry enemy. Here's today's progress in a GIF

I spent some time today updating the hero character a bit. The characters in Phantom are not drawn in any software, there are put together with about 10 ellipses (1 head, 1 torso, 2 for each hands, 2 for each legs) and then animating them in Unity.

I tried to create some element of depth by adjusting brightness of different body parts of the character. Here's a basic run cycle.

What do you think?

I'm taking some time to make some deep changes to Phantom to create interesting stealth scenarios in future. The feedback I've received so far from NG players has been very helpful.

I'm spending lot of time playing Volume and Desperados-3 for inspiration and to determine what exactly I like in stealth genre. There are gameplay elements in both of those games that I like and some things that I don't.

I love the rich environment of Desperados and find their story line very engaging. Volume is a stripped down stealth puzzle game, which gives tons of stealth puzzles by combining various game mechanics. Moreover Volume also needs some mastery of controls. The solutions to puzzles in Volume are mostly logical, but they also depend on how well you execute them. This is not the case in Desparados, where how skillfully you move doesn't matter towards achieving the goals. You have to observe the scenario and exploit it at your own pace. In fact that's my favorite part. I suck at controls, that's why I get frustrated with platformer games. So expect the same to see in Phantom. However Phantom won't be nearly as rich looking as Desparados, for I'm the only developer. But I would like to see that gameplay in a 2D top-down setup that you've played in current version of Phantom.

Stay tuned for more to come. Cheers!

v0.4.1 Changelog:

• Fixed a bug caused by momentum of hero character when he enters vent/manhole. It used to cause the hero to teleport somewhere else on the map. The hero now stops when he hides in a vent/manhole
• Made the fix for selective viewcone rendering better to improve performance
• Fullscreen support

Features and bugfixes in v0.4

• Added new tile artwork for some beginning rooms
• Separated the command buttons from contextual action buttons, so that they are clearer
• Added hotkey displays to all buttons.
• Added basic XBox controller support (not complete yet)
• Two new mechanisms: Laser and Proximity sensor triggered doors
• Added menus to navigate around in the game
• Added Pause menu to respawn or reload any previous checkpoint
• Fixed one performance issue which should improve FPS