James and I have taken a bit of a break from our crafting game to work on a smaller project we hope we'd be able to polish up and ship faster (the other game is a working-on-it-for-4-years kind of game with all of the content and story we'd want to add).

Untitled Forest (not the actual title) is a small ode to the type of survival / colony builders that we love to play. We've played and enjoyed a lot of the indies in this category – doubly so for anything co-op – like Don't Starve, Oxygen Not Included (can you tell we are huge fans of Klei?), Rimworld (and DF of course), Starbound, and so on. We wanted to try out a small version ourselves that brought out what we love about those games with a whimsical art style.

Last week, our friend Sitong joined for the week to hack with us on a prototype! I got to draw in the minimalistic black-and-white style I used sometimes for silly comics at work, and I'm very excited about where this idea is headed.

You start in a sparse canvas where you can explore the surroundings that pop into view (sound effects courtesy of James making funny noises into a mic and banging things on his desk – see full video at the end of this post to hear them).

If you look closely, the squirrels help you harvest berries after you build them a house. Hooray, automation!

I had some fun learning how to draw frame animations of each of the animals. It's similar to pixel art (in that each of the frames is drawn separately, old school) but with the freedom of doodling and not worrying about precisely where each pixel needed to go.

Overall, a really fun week and we're proud of the prototype we built! The full video for those of you who'd like to hear artisanally crafted sound effects:

It's our very first #screenshotsaturday, and we're excited to show off some of the new assets we've been working on over the last few weeks. We've been working on this game for a little over a month now, and it's starting to come together (read: I have finally replaced all of James's programmer art).

We don't have a name yet – that's something we hope to have a brilliant epiphany about soon – but we're hard at work on some of the other major mechanics of the game.

Lots of firsts over the last week: first grass, first buildings and trees, and first animated sprites!

It is very exciting to have some of the most important animated sprites done. I was apprehensive about doing these since I'd never done animation before (pixel art in general is new to me and and isometric is extra hard mode), but they turned out alright! We cheated and this progress update only has walking in 8 directions, the other action directional sprites have yet to be finished. 🙃

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Love,
Amber & James