fault-classic

[fault-classic]

Happy Birthday @fault-classic Hope you have a good one and that I didn't softlock myself by not recruiting Isaac or Vito.

[fault-classic]

happy birthday @fault-classic

your work has and still a major inspiration for my doodles and drawings.

[fault-classic]

joint birthday gift for Alchykiller and Will. Our characters from when we played the Elden Ring DLC back in 2024.

[fault-classic]

My submissions for the 2025 Newgrounds Festival Character Design War, hosted by Oolong and Cubesona

[fault-classic]

It's been a little while, what have I been working on?

My latest work went into making some pretty significant tweaks to the battle results screen. Really starting to tie things together now, but it's not quite finished yet! That's not all, though.

Back in May I was experimenting with RPG Maker's "weather" system. I had implemented a map-specific "overhang" layer that framed the edges of rooms with black space. That prevented weather effects - like snow particles - from displaying beyond the boundaries of the room.

The frogs are just my debug objects for turning the snow on and off.

But it's not like I wanted it to snow indoors - after I had the overhangs figured out, I rewrote the behaviour and graphics code for the "snow" particles to create these dust particles that float around aimlessly.

This ought to make the catacomb interiors feel appropriately dusty - and make the environments feel less still and lifeless in general.

They even display on the battle screen... though sometimes they tend to crowd around the left side of the screen because of the panning and sliding during the battle intro animation. I'll have to fix that at some point.

During May and June, Vito got a complete set of battle sprites and an attack animation.

And so did Yolei. Oh, and the dog enemy is also new.

The dog enemy is very evasive, but also cowardly and not very tough.

It is capable of the "flee" action, something that slimes and skeletons will not do.

At the end of June I added a MAJOR quality of life feature. When Ashley is facing something on the map that can be interacted with or talked to with the action button, a quotation bubble with an exclamation mark will pop up above their head. No ambiguity! No more pixel hunting or mashing the action button in front of every random tile!

I didn't save any screenshots in July, it was a busy month I guess. But in August I got back to work.

Remember this old sprite? From February of 2023?

Well, I'm revisiting this enemy type with more practice under my belt. Here are some gifs I recorded as I was figuring them out and implementing their assets and abilities.

As armored enemies, they are very hardy - the weaker party members will have a hard time damaging them with basic attacks.

In addition to their basic attacks, all undead enemies can perform a skill that inflicts "fear" status on one party member, which depletes their morale over time...

Here's the same battle running with the mood lighting and dust effects turned on. While I was fiddling with the code, I was also able to configure the target animation to not play if the skill misses. It looked sloppy otherwise.

At some point I put a big, animated door on the front entrance of the debug dungeon. I used this door as a testing model for other interactive doors to use later.

I also spent the last few days of the month filling out Nana's spellbook with some more spell animations. "Dazzle" inflicts dizzy on the entire enemy party. Dizzy enemies have a chance of hitting the wrong target with their basic attacks - including their own allies. Hitting a dizzy target with a basic attack will also knock them down and stun them for one turn.

"Fume" poisons one enemy with a cloud of noxious gas, dealing damage over time.

I should of course note that since skeletons don't breathe, they can't be poisoned in the final game - I was only using this one to demonstrate the animation here.

that's all for now!

[fault-classic]

DARK ELF, gift art for my buddy Oolong's birthday.

[fault-classic]

Mai Shiranui and Elena

Drew this back in June, when the Street Fighter 6 DLC was announced.

[fault-classic]

Vivian from paper mario

I actually had no idea the character was trending when I drew this! I was just trying to get back into doing a little fan art. but now it's blowing up on twitter.

[fault-classic]

Here's some stuff from a "Screenshot Saturday" post I made over on twitter. A few highlights from recent development!

Isaac has a revamped battle sprite. I wanted to better emphasize that he's left-handed, so I have him positioned with his dominant hand toward the enemy.

Here's the party screen - the thing I made those fancy status portraits for. It's a pretty standard "character sheet" for whatever party members currently accompanying Ashley, with all of their mechanical information and a few personal details at the bottom. It's also where you'd change their equipment or have them cast spells.

The status portraits were also the basis for the party member's dialogue portraits. At some point I'll share the placeholder dialogue portraits used in older builds!

While I'm at it, I made the save screen look a little nicer.

Oh, and when you load a file from the main menu, it drops the party at the top of the camp site like so. Things could get messy and complicated if I didn't put in a little fix like that.

But here's the big one...

Fishing is in the game now.

I'm still touching up the aesthetics, some of these gifs are from before I added all the fancy effects.

You can fish anywhere there's a water tile! (As long as you have a fishing rod and bait.) Fishing synergized well with the planned resource management systems, and I'm always eager to give the player more "verbs" they can do within gameplay. I also learned a lot about moveroutes when I was setting up the system to find valid tiles and animate the bobber...

[fault-classic]

What have I been doing? Oh yeah, big milestone... the main party now have "status portraits" that show up on the party screen.

It was important to me that somewhere in the game the player can see the characters as "on model" as they could be, while still being pixel art. I wanted a version of them that wasn't distorted by being a tiny field sprite or a super-deformed battle sprite.

remember this model sheet I did way back in 2021? It was the basis for the pixel art portraits above.

[fault-classic]

This is where it all started to come together.

I wrapped these up in March of 2021, and since then they have been the models for all further asset creation. The character designs have never been more locked-in.

[fault-classic]

I haven't posted a game dev update since July!

Up top, you can see the fancy new transition from the field screen to the battle screen. It's all synched up with music and sound effects too, but the .gif doesn't really show those! In time I might add more flashy graphics to it, maybe something more complicated than just the cinematic bars and the colour overlay. But the framework is perfectly serviceable!

You might have also noticed the fancy new HP and Mana bars. They update dynamically when you take a hit! The attack animation on these skeletons is also new.

HP and MP used to look like this. This gif is from August, some other things have changed since then, but the bone toss animation is still pretty solid.

I also did some work with Animation Z-layering. Ashley is dizzy here. See how the stars are in front of his head, but the potion he's using is BEHIND his hand? This was a little tricky to configure.

Big quality of life feature! I coded an "auto battle" function. If used at the start of battle, it orders every party member to attack a random target.

But, if used at any point after, the auto command will REPEAT the inputs from the previous round, including spell and item use!

In between working on Skeletons, I also added the graphics for a wild dog enemy. I spent more time animating that tail swish than any of the other graphics...

I ran some other tests to make sure certain things were working correctly. Undead enemies are supposed to take damage from healing spells, so I had to make sure that was all displaying right!

I was also testing a zombie status, where healing spells hurt the party members. When it's applied, the party member's sprite hue shifts so they look all sickly. Getting this hue shift to occur in the middle of the animation like that, and not before or after or something, was complicated.

[fault-classic]

Recent traditional work.

[fault-classic]

Thank you Rumrusher! So hard to believe it’s been ten years

Traditional @fault-classic fanart. 9ish years of drawing this folklore character from a long gone webcomic. Still hope fault had a better year and hope the next one be better.

[fault-classic]

Sprite work from March!

Lightning spells cause Slimes to EXPLODE, which hits all combatants and causes chain reactions.

Isaac and Nana have attack animations now.

Isaac’s slash took a couple of tries to figure out.

Undead enemies have a skill that inflicts FEAR status.

Tested out a REFLECT status that bounces spells back at the caster.

Added some miscellaneous animations. I’ll explain what these mean later.

Began working on battle sprites for Yolei the Thief.

With Sifwithagun’s help, fixed a minor display issue with some characters in the UI.

Rounded out the month with some room tiles for a dungeon.

[fault-classic]

Sprite work from April.

The tileset work from last month has been painstakingly assembled into a small test dungeon. It’s constructed as a series of rooms glued together with door events. Each time Ashley passes through a door, there is a chance for an enemy encounter to occur, as seen in the above gif.

The transition sequence is still a work in progress. You might notice Vito doesn’t have a unique pose for it yet.

Though the rooms use the same general palette of floor textures, wall details, and props, there are no 100% repeated room layouts.

Some rooms in the dungeon are DARK ROOMS where Ashley’s field of view is limited. Luckily, Ashley has a lantern that can light up these areas.

Some rooms in the dungeon are barred with locked doors. If you have a key, you can try it in any lock you find.

The amount of oil remaining in Ashley’s lantern and the number of disposable keys the party has are all tracked on the menu screen.

At the end of the month, I was getting quite tired of only ever running into Slimes, so I began work on more enemies to give the dungeon some much-needed variety.

[fault-classic]

May and June were pretty busy for me, so I didn't have as much time to work on game dev. I'll condense what I've done over those two months into one post.

May and June's work was focused on building a CAMP area. This is where the party gathers outside of the dungeon, and where Ashley can save the game, switch out party members, and rest to restore HP and MP.

It all started with this mockup image here. Originally the Camp and the entrance to the dungeon were supposed to be two separate rooms with a fade-to-black in between them, but that idea didn't make it past the initial concept stage.

The idea for the trees to form this black barrier around the room perimeter was also thrown out - I couldn't use the same principles for designing interiors as I did for outdoor areas. It would take a different approach.

Getting the look right was an involved process. My first blueprints for the entrance made it out to be this enormous megastructure when I actually constructed it in-engine.

Gluing the trees together like A Link to the Past was a good idea though.

Attempts to pare the map down into something more manageable resulted in this awkward half-way step. There were still too many repeated textures for my liking, it was still too big, and it kind of looked like it was under construction instead of being in ruins.

This is the last mockup I went with before I collected the assets and actually built the thing in engine.

I found it useful from a technical perspective to start with a very blown-out, saturated colour palette, and then work "subtractively" from there, dialing down the colours using the in-engine tools as appropriate.

Have I shown off the diagonal stair movement before? That was something I coded myself. The tops and bottoms of the stairs act as little triggers that change the outputs of the movement keys as appropriate. You don't have to zig zag down the stairs like I've seen in some RPG Maker games.

Party members who aren't currently following Ashley will hang back at the campsite. Ashley can swap them out like so - but the assets for everyone aren't quite done yet. Yolei doesn't have a walking sprite!

I did a lot of experimenting to figure out the range of different palettes I could get without making changes to the tileset assets themselves.

I coded an in-game clock that ticks down when Ashley walks around outside of camp. The weather conditions and lighting change depending on when the party returns to camp - this would be late in the day, around sunset.

If the Ashley returns to camp after dark, the remaining party members will have a little fire set up.

The effects to make this fire work right are really elaborate. I might make a second post to explain everything that went into it.