PINPIN #2 — Budding Blooming Park

Hey everyone! Happy Friday, and happy April all! I'm excited to welcome the spring showers and flowers in bloom with our next PINPIN: TILTEDTALE update.

Over the past two months, we've been hard at work on ideation, design decisions, and prototyping. In the previous blog posts I introduced the first two party members, Pino and Julieta. Now I'd love to introduce the third party member (also featured in this post's banner art) Sordello: a country gentle giant bull that works his family's farm while dreaming of taking his PinPin skills out into the world. Being the oldest of the group at twenty-one, he's the dependable "big bro" for the others to lean on to make the hard choices. He's also got a knack for support and healing!

What gorgeous little spins they do~

In terms of prototyping, I jumped back into the project, focusing on playing around with a bunch of new plugins and testing out features to jazz up the overworld of the game. Check it out in this tech demo I recorded below:

In the coming months, I want to switch gears over again to the battles themselves. Maybe I'll finally nail that transition between the battles and overworld! (The game is almost shippable, guys. I promise.)

And speaking of battles, take something from our design team: status effects! We wanted to try and make something that would be easy to read at a glance while being cute. What better way to do that than through slapping a bunch of stickers everywhere?

Most importantly for our timeline, we've been chugging toward our Beautiful Corner, an artistic mock-up of what a screenshot of the final game should theoretically look like. Things change during production, obviously, but it's a good step to both help us align our vision as we delve deeper into production and share our ideas more visually with you all!

While we considered using Pin City as the area to feature for our Beautiful Corner and Vertical Slice, we felt that something more glamorous and colorful might capture the overall aesthetics and show off the vibes of PINPIN better.

Something glamorous, something amusing...

Amusing...amuse-ment...amusement...park? An amusement park. A park! Specifically, Playfield Park, an area later in the game that's full of roller coasters, Ferris wheels, food stalls, and more! It's supposed to be a larger-than-life experience, the happiest place on planet PinPin, you could say. Take a bunch of back to back sketches of what's coming for our milestones, from the actual battle field itself to the overworld:

Hopefully we'll start adding dazzling color to this park in the near future. Our artists and designers are hard at work on explorations, figuring out more about the environments and thinking about the potential enemies our heroes might face in such an area.

Don't worry. It's park-sanctioned roughhousing, all in good fun. For the most part.

With all that said, thank you for sticking around and staying in the loop! We're excited for the stuff we're making and hope to share even cooler stuff come June.

See ya' next time.