Screenshot Saturday Sunday: Paper lighthouse, dour coasts and a rocket-propelled sedan
Screenshot Saturday Sundays!
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! It's time once more to hack into the big game database and pull top-secret, work-in-progress screenshots and videos out from under the noses of unsuspecting developers and hobbyists. Or, well, fire up Twitter and choose some pretty clips I liked the look of. This week: line-art lighthouses, lovely skeletons, stop-motion seamen and drive-by rocket launchers.
Starting things off is artist John Evelyn, showing off his penmanship with hand-drawn 3D sculptures that put my idle doodles to shame.
From my hand-drawn adventure: The Collage Atlas - for all you #screenshotsaturday folk.
As ever, all the textures you see were drawn with 0.03mm fineliner pens on watercolour paper before being scanned and brought to life in Unity. pic.twitter.com/oAU2tA4Y92
— John Evelyn ? (@johnevelyn) May 16, 2020
The Collage Atlas last showed up in this column just over a year ago. Creating scenes by penning out assets on paper and scanning them into Unity, Elevyn's also created some wonderfully delicate dioramas over on his blog. I love how this week's lighthouse captures that physicality, coming together as a fragile sculpture that would seem to break at my touch. While it seemed set for release last Summer, it's now unclear when Evelyn will open the Atlas for all.
We're lingering at sea for a little moment longer to check out Riku Tamminen's moody, desaturated cliffsides.
Did some stairs today!#screenshotsaturday #gamedev pic.twitter.com/O0mxkgNOiA
— Riku Tamminen (@reinkout) May 16, 2020
Tamminen seems to have gone through several looks in attempting to define this unannounced journey's tone - dabbling in the comical before coming to this broad, ominous greyscale. A neat trick I'm seeing more often these days is the idea of staggering framerates in character animations, and Tamminen uses this technique frequently to create the impression of stop-motion dioramas - immediately creating a strange tension in these spaces.
But enough larking about on beaches. Crank up the tempo and get in the car, loser.
Cleaned things up a lot more. It's now actually possible to aim at distant enemies while drifting.#ScreenShotSaturday pic.twitter.com/SC3SJ6uwbH
— Kieran Lord (@cratesmith) May 16, 2020
Kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it? Proper good car combat games are few and far between these days, and Keiran Lord's untitled drift n' blast looks a riot. It's all in the small details, too - from the way rockets fire leisurely before kicking into second-stage overdrive, to the tilt in the camera as the car skids and snaps off some sniper rounds. Every spark and pop is finely-tuned to perfection. Brilliant stuff.
Finally, look. I'm a sucker for a good, crunchy-lookin' twin-stick - moreso if you're summoning skeletons all over the shop.
Have been iterating on the controls and UI, trying to give the player a lot of options with simple inputs.#screenshotsaturday #pixelart #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity pic.twitter.com/Y9SBa5yyyl
— Mate Cziner (@MateCziner) May 16, 2020
Conveniently described by a commenter as a necromancer bullet hell, the Bonzai Defense developer Cziner's latest is selling some powerful Scourgebringer vibes. It's in shimmering haze of the UI, thick pixels rippling at each motion - if not so much in the actual play. Cziner's untitled project is inarguably less hectic, a more methodical shoot n' summon 'em up that has you raising the dead to fight the other, less friendly dead.
Fair enough.
