Solastia — Feelings of development

Hello, itch.

This is not my first experience in game development, but this is the first release.

All previous projects eventually became too ambitious, and then suddenly the time/mood/desire disappeared. A common problem among beginners when you want to do EVERYTHING with the game. Therefore, I firmly decided to make the game as simple as possible in order to finally have at least some progress. Throughout the time, I still did not leave the desire to add a bunch of things to the game. What did I end up adding?

1. The background of the level adjusts to the picture. The picture is divided into 4 parts and from them I'm looking for the color that is repeated most often. The background is a gradient of four colors that are most often repeated. This feature has several drawbacks. Firstly, it would be better to do such calculations with a shader. I literally go through each pixel of the picture and save its color. The larger the picture, the greater the load. But shaders are still very tight for me. Secondly, it is better to take not the most frequently repeated color, but the general color scheme. A dark purple picture runs the risk of getting a black background without splashes of purple.
   Here is a good example of this shortcoming. There is a lot of blue / purple here, but of different saturation and shades.
2. "Game board". You choose any picture — you indicate how many parts to break it into and collect it. The idea is simple, but there were several unpleasant pitfalls. First, the seams. A picture is taken, cut into the required number of parts, and they all line up one after another. And it so happened that sometimes, with different parameters for the number of sections, gaps appeared. This happened in cases where the height or length of one section was not an integer, but a real number. This problem is more clearly described on this site: 0.30000000000000004, here's how it could look for me:
3. Art of people from Artstation. When the idea of the game first came to my mind, I wanted to arm myself with sensational AI and generate pictures for myself, which the players would then put together. But at some point I thought that it would be cool to use the work of artists. When I already had something like the first demo, I went to wool Artstation in search of bright art. The genre of Solarpunk was my guide, because it seems to me very curious. I spent more than one hour looking for works, checking how they would look. In the end, I wrote to about 20 people asking them to use the art, showing how their work would look in the game. And answered me... 3 people. The first artist gave the go-ahead and then asked me to give her a link to the game. The second guy refused, because I coveted the work that he did to order, and offered to choose another art (in the end we were able to pick it up). And the third just refused.

Frustrated, I decided to write a post on reddit about looking for artists. Then I posted it on Twitter and asked Andrei Apanasik to repost it. I followed the statistics of views both on reddit and on twitter. The indicators went almost 1 to 1, but at some point there was a gap of more than 1k views. In the first 24 hours, 5 people wrote to me. In general, it turned out that I had 5 works in my hands that were ready to be in the game.

In the comments under the post on reddit, they gave a tip that paintings from the national art gallery can be used in the game. Thanks to this tip, I added a few more levels.

To summarize, I can say that I can not get rid of the feeling that I devoted more to many things than I needed to. This is despite the fact that the game uses standard UI elements, the art taken was ready-made, and there are no sounds in the game at all. I think the next project will have everything of its own.