This is super inspiring. What an incredible story told in a very powerful way. I will be watching this one. Thanks for sharing and bringing us along for the journey
I've been seeing this art style be embraced by several other upcoming games, and it LOVE the look. Very excited for it. I appreciate the back story of your own journey dealing with critical illness in the family, and glad to hear his health is good now. Here's to many more healthy years!
wow, it's awesome to see another game that shares some similarities with ours, especially the 2.5D aesthetic and inspiration from hyper Light drifter and I must say that your game looks amazing, definitely going to be following this journey
I just started my first game development project in grad school. Your video got excites me to create a game. I can't wait to watch more devlog videos and play this game. It looks amazing, I look forward to following your success.
Me encanta el arte de tu juego, y cómo encaraste el tema de no mostrar diálogos! Eso a mi parecer hace que sea más inmersivo. Felicitaciones! Espero que salga con muchas ansias!
It looks really great ! I like the dynamic gameplay and dig the art direction. I look forward to seeing your progress on your game, I wish you the best !
this looks cool as hell, normally I'm not a big fan of 2D games and their aesthetics but the mix of the 2D with a 3D world look very stylized and nice. I think its a bold decision to not have any dialogue, but I think it will make this game stand out all that more, Hey I too am an inspiring game dev though my stages are in its infancy, and its people like you that inspire me to create, you really created something special here and I'm wishing you the best. And I'm excited to hear more from the Devlogs and hear the whole story!
Don't love that what happened to you and your family caused hurt but I do love that you're using this as an outlet to process that hurt and trauma. To me, the best projects come from this.
I think its really nice! Good job. I love the choice of magical particle effects, they’re really cool but at the same time not overloading the screen so you can actually see whats going on here!
This looks fantastic! I think the original look is also interesting tbh and to me does look a bit more cohesive. That said it still looks great in the hybrid version and I get the appeal you are feeling for that so will be interesting to follow this. I am a fellow unity dev so I am not suprised that unity would work great for your project. Good luck!
Thanks! I agree that the original is more cohesive, and I'm a big fan of pixel art in general. I still have plans to continue refining the hybrid visuals, so I'm looking forward to further developing the look in the coming months :)
Thanks! I wish I could take all the credit, but it's modified from the asset store, and sadly the creator no longer has their work for sale anymore. It's one of my favorites too though, and while I'll likely make a few more revisions to them, I want to make sure that this character retains that powerful yet highly intelligent look.
This looks very promising! Haven't seen many games take on a 3D world with 2D characters, so I'm excited to see it progress. All the effects look great by the way :)
I like the textless story goal. That is REALLY cool, and I've also got to give you props for dynamic music and aesthetic. I personally don't like the chromatic abberation/blur. I also suspect I wouldn't like the final game, because it appears it will be somewhat conventional in it's design... maybe. Either way, good luck with your game buddy! It's already super impressive for an indie dev!
love the progress! have you considered adding pixel art normal map on your characters? they've done it with deadcells and it might benefit yours as well
It's definitely on my list of considerations at the moment. Once I finish a few more of the features, I plan on going back in and polishing up the visuals, and normal maps on the sprites is something that's always intrigued me...
@@reboundstudios8 doing it manually is probably the best method for a polished output but you could probably test it out with tools like sprite dlight to check if it helps blend your 2d character into 3d world ❤
looks insanely well polished. also, the feature set already seems to be worth a couple of dollars. the world is richer with more good games. thank you for making it so.
looks very promising! Something that stood up a bit for me is that the character seems too small compared to the world, unlike in the 2D version. Big objects like stairs and railings, huge ground textures make the character look out of place, but inside the castle, where things are smaller, he fits really well. Indoor scenes show size better right now. Adding small details outside like pebbles on big slabs, and more props for scale reference might help.
Very cool project man. If you ever wanted to tweak the "style" of some of the 3D assets you are using, you should consider looking at different kinds of shaders. They can make a world of difference in terms of vibe and atmosphere. Best of luck. :^)
Usually when someone says they been working on a project for 4+ yrs im like how?? Its normally that image you showed when you first started but this this looks amazing. Mechanics animation lighting etc like you can tell alot of work went into this.
I like it :) Something I would improve would be the projectile blocking part. From the video it looks like you can stay in the "block" stance for quite a while. It feels a bit static too. I think it be cool if you played a super short animation when the projectile is blocked. Either some small knockback, or an attack animation as if they were hitting the projectile back. Glad your kid is doing good now, as a new father, those things are scaaary to even think about.
Great callout here. Right now the block is almost exactly like the original God of War in terms of form and functionality. Basically, in the older God of War games, the block was only a means for additional offense, but I definitely hear where you're coming from. It's honestly on my list to revisit in the near future though, so it's nice to see a reaction like this.
Lovely art direction and great ambition! Would love to play it :) The only thing for me is clarity during battle while projectiles are flying around. I think the player could easily be lost behind particle effects and enemy sprites, but that can only be said after playing it. Best of luck!!
Greetings and gotta say, love the work so far! Quick question, are you planning to pixelate/stylize the 3D environment the same way that the characters and fx are? Would help wrap the style up together more cohesively in my opinion.
Yeah, this is definitely something I'm considering. Once I iron out a few more features I plan on doing more of a deep dive into the visuals to see how far I can push it, but your suggestion is something that's been weighing heavily on the back of my mind for a while now...
Seems promising! Have you considered some sort of pixel filter, or pixel textures for the environments to closer bring the art style together? They look pretty good on their own, but my first thought was they clash somewhat with the pixel art sprites, where as octopath blends it quite well. Either way looking forward to seeing more, good luck! Edit: seems like you have from what I see in other comments, so nvm then haha
Hello, a fellow indie dev here. To my knowledge, you shouldn't use the term HD2D for your game, as HD-2D term itself is trademarked by Square Enix. I think it's fine to describe your game as being in a similar style to HD2D but labeling it as an HD-2D game, could lead to some issues in the future. Hope this helps!
Your game is EXACTLY the style i want to go for and i started learning UE5, though it's been a few days i'm very tempted by learning playmaker which seems way easier to begin with. I love UE5 but as you said there's so many things to learn to begin with. Did you feel like playmaker was easier than blueprints? i'm curious on your POV. Concerning the HD 2D scene, was it difficult to set up compared to UE ? Thanks ! (would love to chat with you on discord about projects haha)
For Playmaker vs Blueprints, I honestly LOVE using Blueprints. They're incredibly powerful and offer limitless capabilities. Playmaker is literally a State Machine, and as such, it's honestly very robust and easy to use. For me it was everything else around these two core features that lead me back to Unity. I'm very confident with my ability to leverage Blueprints in Unreal, and have done some very complicated designs/features, it's just when it came down to the combination of Paper 2D/ZD + Animation BPs + Behavior Trees + Blueprints + [insert here] it just got a little overwhelming for me. Technically you could probably do just about everything within the Blueprints themselves, but it felt like I was skating uphill when I had already built a strong foundation in Unity that did just about everything I wanted it to do. For setting up the HD2D visual aesthetic, they were both relatively easy. I just had to download a custom shader in Unity to get the shadows to work properly. In UE5, similarly you need to download the Paper ZD plugin. Setting up the animations is probably slightly easier in Unreal, but it's honestly not that bad in Unity. I'm on sort of a time crunch to have this project completed within about a year, but if I had more time, I may brute force my way through some of the UE5 challenges that I faced. So really, that's what it came down to for me, time...
@@reboundstudios8 thanks ! i'm curious which shader you used for the shadows. I feel like playmaker seems easier to understand than blueprints but i'm not sure
Wow! So impressed with this world you created, and I can't wait to play one day!
Glad you family is doing good man. Ready to see more of the game also! Looking good!
This looks awesome man. I love that you took a rough part of your life and turned it into something really beautiful
This is super inspiring. What an incredible story told in a very powerful way. I will be watching this one. Thanks for sharing and bringing us along for the journey
I've been seeing this art style be embraced by several other upcoming games, and it LOVE the look. Very excited for it. I appreciate the back story of your own journey dealing with critical illness in the family, and glad to hear his health is good now. Here's to many more healthy years!
Looking great! Good luck on the project. It's amazing how we can all share our stories, makes the world a more rich place.
wow, it's awesome to see another game that shares some similarities with ours, especially the 2.5D aesthetic and inspiration from hyper Light drifter and I must say that your game looks amazing, definitely going to be following this journey
I just started my first game development project in grad school. Your video got excites me to create a game. I can't wait to watch more devlog videos and play this game. It looks amazing, I look forward to following your success.
Wowowow coming out the gate strong on this first devlog!
amazing work, this amount of content and the polish are very impressive for an indie dev
Looks incredible, huge potential for going viral!
The lighting and art style is special bro well done
This art style is amazing! I can't wait to stay updated.
Amazing work, the game is coming along beautifully.
Me encanta el arte de tu juego, y cómo encaraste el tema de no mostrar diálogos! Eso a mi parecer hace que sea más inmersivo. Felicitaciones! Espero que salga con muchas ansias!
Looks great! Very polished!
Great dev log! I'm looking forward to hearing more about your journey. Good luck out there!
That looks soo good! Super impressive! Can’t wait to see more.(: I think the styles match up perfectly.
It looks really great ! I like the dynamic gameplay and dig the art direction. I look forward to seeing your progress on your game, I wish you the best !
Looks great and really inspires others to create their own game thank you sir. All my energies are with you
looks amazing dude, keep updating us
I tend to watch and leave comments while I'm at work so all I know is that this game looks beautiful in a way that indies sometimes don't. Very nice
This is looking excellent I'm surprised there aren't more games using this HD2D style. Keep going strong with your game!
really love the aesthetic, looking forward to to seeing how it turns out.
The style looks so good! and it looks like it has a lot of juice already, keep it up!
this looks cool as hell, normally I'm not a big fan of 2D games and their aesthetics but the mix of the 2D with a 3D world look very stylized and nice. I think its a bold decision to not have any dialogue, but I think it will make this game stand out all that more,
Hey I too am an inspiring game dev though my stages are in its infancy, and its people like you that inspire me to create, you really created something special here and I'm wishing you the best.
And I'm excited to hear more from the Devlogs and hear the whole story!
This looks great! and promising! looking forward to further updates.
Looks amazing! Can't wait to see more devlogs!
It's looking good! Keep it up
Don't love that what happened to you and your family caused hurt but I do love that you're using this as an outlet to process that hurt and trauma. To me, the best projects come from this.
The game is looking absolute fire, great work!
Can’t wait to see more content from you this looks amazing
It looks fantastic! Good luck I hope it is a success :) I really enjoy the aesthetic and smoothness/snappiness
Looking forward to it! Game looks phenomenonal
Looks awesome! Looking forward to seeing more!
I think its really nice! Good job. I love the choice of magical particle effects, they’re really cool but at the same time not overloading the screen so you can actually see whats going on here!
Looks great. Can't wait to play!
as someone who loved hyperlight drifter this looks really cool, can't wait to see more
Glad your son is doing well. Keep doing what you're doing here. Looking promising.
this looks amazing, great work !!!!
I never wishlist any dev log i see but this one looks really good , Cant wait to play it ! , keep up the good work !
This looks really cool. Good luck with the project
Looks stunning! I'm very curious to see where it goes!
Amazing game. Subscribed and definitely waiting for more vids! Keep on rockin' buddy!
Looks very promising. Love the aesthetics and the gamefeel
Amazing! Stoked to see more
This looks absolutely insane.
Looks very cool, love the artstyle.
hope you make it big!
Love the art style.
psychological pain is a fuel for imagination, like the graphics and animations
Nice job! Definitely following to see your progress
Art style is dope, hope to see your success one day
Really curious what your Unreal engine limitations were for the project. Looks great by the way. Can't wait to see where it goes.
I'll definitely get into that soon. I have plenty of experience in both engines at this point, so I'd be happy to break it down more.
yo, holy sheet. put a demo out asap. This looks super fun!
This looks fantastic! I think the original look is also interesting tbh and to me does look a bit more cohesive. That said it still looks great in the hybrid version and I get the appeal you are feeling for that so will be interesting to follow this. I am a fellow unity dev so I am not suprised that unity would work great for your project. Good luck!
Thanks!
I agree that the original is more cohesive, and I'm a big fan of pixel art in general. I still have plans to continue refining the hybrid visuals, so I'm looking forward to further developing the look in the coming months :)
Keep It Up Bro !
This priestess character design is so fricken cool.
Thanks! I wish I could take all the credit, but it's modified from the asset store, and sadly the creator no longer has their work for sale anymore.
It's one of my favorites too though, and while I'll likely make a few more revisions to them, I want to make sure that this character retains that powerful yet highly intelligent look.
This looks so exciting!
man this looks really good.
I just subscribed and am looking forward to further updates.
This looks very promising! Haven't seen many games take on a 3D world with 2D characters, so I'm excited to see it progress. All the effects look great by the way :)
Ah yes i love this style, hope it get released for switch one day
subscribed - this looks insane good
This world looks super interesting
Like the Show don't Tell approach
beautiful!
I like the textless story goal. That is REALLY cool, and I've also got to give you props for dynamic music and aesthetic.
I personally don't like the chromatic abberation/blur. I also suspect I wouldn't like the final game, because it appears it will be somewhat conventional in it's design... maybe.
Either way, good luck with your game buddy! It's already super impressive for an indie dev!
Great callout with the chromatic aberration! I'm still playing around with some post FX, and I'll revisit the overall look in a few months...
Keep going, looks great!
love the progress! have you considered adding pixel art normal map on your characters? they've done it with deadcells and it might benefit yours as well
It's definitely on my list of considerations at the moment. Once I finish a few more of the features, I plan on going back in and polishing up the visuals, and normal maps on the sprites is something that's always intrigued me...
@@reboundstudios8 doing it manually is probably the best method for a polished output but you could probably test it out with tools like sprite dlight to check if it helps blend your 2d character into 3d world ❤
Looks amazing !
looks insanely well polished. also, the feature set already seems to be worth a couple of dollars.
the world is richer with more good games. thank you for making it so.
The combat looks slick.
can you release a demo version for now?
this looks amazing
Extremely cool.
looks very promising! Something that stood up a bit for me is that the character seems too small compared to the world, unlike in the 2D version. Big objects like stairs and railings, huge ground textures make the character look out of place, but inside the castle, where things are smaller, he fits really well. Indoor scenes show size better right now. Adding small details outside like pebbles on big slabs, and more props for scale reference might help.
Wow, so good
You really understand 3D and pixel art
I'll take these pills Jeff
Very cool project man. If you ever wanted to tweak the "style" of some of the 3D assets you are using, you should consider looking at different kinds of shaders. They can make a world of difference in terms of vibe and atmosphere. Best of luck. :^)
Yeah I think there's still room for exploration in that area. I'd definitely like to mess around with some shaders in the near future.
damn, looking good!
Usually when someone says they been working on a project for 4+ yrs im like how?? Its normally that image you showed when you first started but this this looks amazing. Mechanics animation lighting etc like you can tell alot of work went into this.
This looks beautiful ^_^
Looks like a potentially great and fun game!
looking good man
I like it :)
Something I would improve would be the projectile blocking part. From the video it looks like you can stay in the "block" stance for quite a while. It feels a bit static too. I think it be cool if you played a super short animation when the projectile is blocked. Either some small knockback, or an attack animation as if they were hitting the projectile back.
Glad your kid is doing good now, as a new father, those things are scaaary to even think about.
Great callout here. Right now the block is almost exactly like the original God of War in terms of form and functionality. Basically, in the older God of War games, the block was only a means for additional offense, but I definitely hear where you're coming from. It's honestly on my list to revisit in the near future though, so it's nice to see a reaction like this.
Lovely art direction and great ambition! Would love to play it :)
The only thing for me is clarity during battle while projectiles are flying around. I think the player could easily be lost behind particle effects and enemy sprites, but that can only be said after playing it.
Best of luck!!
This is inspiring! :)
Greetings and gotta say, love the work so far!
Quick question, are you planning to pixelate/stylize the 3D environment the same way that the characters and fx are? Would help wrap the style up together more cohesively in my opinion.
Yeah, this is definitely something I'm considering. Once I iron out a few more features I plan on doing more of a deep dive into the visuals to see how far I can push it, but your suggestion is something that's been weighing heavily on the back of my mind for a while now...
That looks great
Seems promising! Have you considered some sort of pixel filter, or pixel textures for the environments to closer bring the art style together? They look pretty good on their own, but my first thought was they clash somewhat with the pixel art sprites, where as octopath blends it quite well. Either way looking forward to seeing more, good luck!
Edit: seems like you have from what I see in other comments, so nvm then haha
damn this is gorgeous
so dope!
Hello, a fellow indie dev here. To my knowledge, you shouldn't use the term HD2D for your game, as HD-2D term itself is trademarked by Square Enix. I think it's fine to describe your game as being in a similar style to HD2D but labeling it as an HD-2D game, could lead to some issues in the future. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the insight! I'll definitely keep that in mind...
this is awesome
You got a new subscriber
So cool I love it when can I play it ??❤
Thank you! My goal is to have this wrapped up within about a year.
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOL!
amazing
It looks amazing! I’m glad you got it working in unity but i’m sad it wasn’t Godot lol. Still, would love to play when it’s available!
He gonna be paying unity half of his earnings I'm using godot than he gotta pay steam royalty fees and unity royalty fees and runtime fees
Looks amazing.
I would suggest rising camera juuust a little bit more, so it si more clearer wher is the player standing.
Maybe like 5° to 10°.
Interesting suggestion, right now the camera is angled downward 25°, at some point I'll probably mess around with this again though. Thanks!
Your game is EXACTLY the style i want to go for and i started learning UE5, though it's been a few days i'm very tempted by learning playmaker which seems way easier to begin with. I love UE5 but as you said there's so many things to learn to begin with. Did you feel like playmaker was easier than blueprints? i'm curious on your POV. Concerning the HD 2D scene, was it difficult to set up compared to UE ? Thanks ! (would love to chat with you on discord about projects haha)
For Playmaker vs Blueprints, I honestly LOVE using Blueprints. They're incredibly powerful and offer limitless capabilities. Playmaker is literally a State Machine, and as such, it's honestly very robust and easy to use. For me it was everything else around these two core features that lead me back to Unity.
I'm very confident with my ability to leverage Blueprints in Unreal, and have done some very complicated designs/features, it's just when it came down to the combination of Paper 2D/ZD + Animation BPs + Behavior Trees + Blueprints + [insert here] it just got a little overwhelming for me. Technically you could probably do just about everything within the Blueprints themselves, but it felt like I was skating uphill when I had already built a strong foundation in Unity that did just about everything I wanted it to do.
For setting up the HD2D visual aesthetic, they were both relatively easy. I just had to download a custom shader in Unity to get the shadows to work properly. In UE5, similarly you need to download the Paper ZD plugin. Setting up the animations is probably slightly easier in Unreal, but it's honestly not that bad in Unity.
I'm on sort of a time crunch to have this project completed within about a year, but if I had more time, I may brute force my way through some of the UE5 challenges that I faced. So really, that's what it came down to for me, time...
@@reboundstudios8 thanks ! i'm curious which shader you used for the shadows.
I feel like playmaker seems easier to understand than blueprints but i'm not sure
Wow i love it.🤩