Bringing My Cozy Isometric Game to Life | Hooked DEVLOG #2

Finally, a new devlog!! This one took sooo long to make. It's really hard when I have to split my time between a thousand things, and game development takes a lot of time in general, but here we are! I would love to hear what you think about the progress we've made on the game in this one. And if you're new here, do you like the idea of "Hooked"? :_MandyLove:

I would recommend not putting a candle below your monitor 💀

One suggestion. When it comes to the level design, I suggest grouping objects together instead of spacing them out evenly. Put stuff like mushrooms or small stones near larger objects like fallen logs and rocks, bushes near trees, etc. And group trees together more densely in some areas. If you have things too evenly distributed, it just looks contrived and unappealing. Things tend to naturally group together in reality. Use it to sorta fade larger objects into the scene with incrementally smaller objects leading away. Use props and foliage to frame the paths and areas the player is expected to navigate, like you would with a fence. A cozy game should be relaxing to look at, random/chaotic prop placement will subconsciously make people feel stressed. Definitely something to look into, as there is more psychology put into level design than people think. Its also very important for the vibe and presentation of the game. I'm both an artist, and have some experience in level design, so thankfully I at least have some sort of idea of what I'm talking about here lol. Your art and style looks great btw! Very professional looking! I'll have to keep up with your devlogs!

You could repurpose your old movement system as a command system for controlling NPCs or pets. I imagine having a dog that follows you by default; but you can also click on the screen and your character makes a little whistle sound and the dog goes to where you clicked. Maybe there can be some simple tasks that a pet can do for you (like fetch/pick up items from the ground or search an area)

Bro concernedape really inspired a whole generation of solo devs

just a little detail. I think it would look better, if the lilipads would move with the waves, now it kinda looks like they are some kind of lilipad-shaped rock

I think you have a winner here. The graphics look beautiful and your vision is perfectionist and well thought, there is no doubt this could be a great success! It will take a few years to have a proper game done, but I think this will be your rocket launch as a successful game developer. You'll just have to fight burnout and time passing by. Also your English is very good! Good luck and keep up the good work! 🙂

Your game looks fantastic. That's a benchmark of how isometric games should look like.

My solution to your pathfinding problem is to get rid of the pathfinding entirely, move back to a wasd directional movement, but everytime the player presses a button to move in a direction by one unity, send a raycast to that point to check your logic for if that point is a spot it can move to and then cancel the movement and animation if it can not walk in that direction, which can be very easily accomplished if you make your movements a looping while true coroutine with a break or return inside of it based on a condition, would only take a couple of functions to pull off and the end result is a hybrid solution to your desire to not use colliders. Another solution would have been to fake the 2D isometric environment while having it actually be a 3D environment where each tile is actually a cube with an isometric sprite as its child that faces the camera, setting it up to align visually exactly like how it would if you just placed them in 2D and making sure that the cubes you place that are behind other objects get their child sprite destroyed or culled or something automatically so you can easily prototype the level without having to constantly check to see if you are wasting memory by having sprites sit behind other ones that wont even be visible and therefore also avoiding z writing issues automatically due to the nature of the 3D space.

Hey there! I just wanted to say that you are an incredible artist. I don't have much experience in pixel art, but seeing your game fires up an urge in me to try it. I love your style and pixel art, and it can't be understated how skilled you are. I also noticed that you have a very in-depth plan for the game, and I can't wait to see where this goes :D

I really love this game! One thing that catched my eye is that the clouds' shadows are still showing at night (there is no light source unless moon is really bright) and when it's raining (all sky is one big cloud probably). I think it could look better if those shadows were there only on sunny days ⛅

What is the organization app seen @2:00 mark?

I absolutely love how everything looks so far! I just hope you don't spend too much time on aesthetics and forget about gameplay. A pretty game is nice but boring if the gameplay is dull.

Can’t you just rotate colliders…

How did ou build the map?

This is really cool! Isometric pixel art games like this are surprisingly rare even in the indie game scene. I'm very excited for it!

0:18 whats that tablet?

Also dude, I highly highly recommend you focus on your core gameplay loop. I think you're spending way too much time on (beautiful) presentation too early without first nailing the fishing mechanics and how that feeds into the game's progression.

I thought I had never heard about this game until you mentioned the Twitter discussion about the lamps, I remember that Tweet! It's looking really nice, the game looks like one I would play c: looking forward to it! I'm surprised it never crossed my mind the reason Stardew only updates the clock every 10 minutes, I had never thought about it that way even though user experience should be one of my areas of expertise, I learned something new today! I also wanted to mention that you might want to tune the bird take off and landing animations, they seem to be always at the same height

Where found this sprites ?