Hello everybody, and welcome back to VV Eekly Update’s first update of 2025! People will remember 2025 as a great year – first, as the first multiple of 25 after 2000, and, second, as the year that Vyn and Verdan came out! Wow!!
Once again, I come to you bearing news of more miscellanea happening in Vyn and Verdan-land. If it seems to you that there’s a lot of miscellanea… well, that’s because there certainly is a lot. A lot of game dev time seems to be spent on “polish all the little knobs” in addition to “make a fun game”. I’m actually a little afraid that I’ve strayed too far from “make a fun game”, and so I want to return to that shortly. However, for this week, we’re still on miscellaneous improvements!
Sprite Updates
I spent some time updating the very first sprites that I made. Back then, I wasn’t quite sure on what the art direction of the game would look like. To be honest, I didn’t even know how to use the art program that I use! I was mostly just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick, and so the sprites from back then are… a little messy.
That’s enough talking about the sprites – let’s take a look:
The very first sprite was this beetle. On the left, you can see the previous beetle, and, on the right, you can see the new beetle. I actually drew the final sprite on a larger canvas and then scaled it down to the final size.
You can see the lines are much smoother and less pixelated. You can also see that the outlines are much thicker, since I standardized the outline width to be much thicker than what I used to use. The first version was also a little tilted to the left (I don’t know how I never noticed before).
Here’s the old charging beetle and new charging beetle. This one hasn’t changed too much from left to right, besides looking slightly neater (but only very slightly).
You might have noticed that the old width/height was 128px by 128px, whereas the new height is 144px by 144px. I decided that large enemies like the charging beetle should be 128px by 128px, but that the sprite might extend outside of the bounding circle. This is definitely something that I had to learn via experience – it never would have occurred to me to make the sprites a different size than the bounding box before I tried it out!
Finally, here’s the old mushroom and new mushroom. I think this mushroom was actually the very first thing that I drew! That’s why the mushroom head is purple, whereas most other enemies only have a purple outline. I tried picking some other colors for the mushroom head, but I decided that purple looked the best.
Inventory Updates
I’ve been working on some inventory updates as well. The first thing I’ve done is to add a tooltip:
When you hover over the word “power” or “influence“, then this tooltip appears. Hopefully, this will be helpful to newer players!
I spent a lot of time trying to make tooltips that would vary on what word you hover over. If you hover over a specific keyword, then you would see different text based on what the keyword was. However, I then realized that there really was only one tooltip that I wanted to show! I don’t regret it too much, since the tooltip will be useful in future games, but I could have saved some time here. Lessons learned!
I also updated the upgrades for each ability:
The upgrades are now formatted slightly better on the bottom of the card.
I still think there’s a lot of work that I could do to make this interface look nicer, since it does look fairly amateur right now. However, I also think that working on UI is a HUGE time sink that only kinda matters in the end. Maybe I’ll work on it later… but there’s more important things right now. These small improvement seemed worthwhile though.
Player Abilities
Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed a change in the previous section.
I’ve swapped around some abilities for Vyn and Verdan. Now, they both have one “controlling” ability – Stun and Speed – and one “support” ability – Shield and Heal. Hopefully, this means that each player feels some responsibility for both managing the field and for supporting the other player, but in meaningfully different senses. We’ll have to see what you think in future playtests!
This was based on some player feedback, so thank you!
Alright, that’s it for today’s VV Eekly Update. Once again, thank you for reading, and please leave any feedback in the usual Discord!