Messages

The spotter has the potential to be a really interesting character.

Great to hear! What I'm aiming for is a man who you never really know whether he is a dumb man trying to sound clever or a clever man pretending to be dumb.
But the sniper will hopefully be an interesting character as well, who loves stating pretentiously grandiose communist platitudes even more than she loves shooting enemies of the state in the head.
She spent most of her time before the war as a lone wolf after losing her family in the revolution, and it's eventually revealed that

Spoiler

the reason she lost them is that her parents were members of the aristocracy, her father even a prince. Turns out she was actually a princess all along!

[close]

Does this sound interesting?

Looks pretty neat and lovely graphics, though I'm no aviation expert and cannot tell whether the plane moves correctly. I see nothing wrong with it though.

It is interesting to see a game about a contemporary crisis and this seems to have a great potential. Best of luck to you!

Some concept art!

I did a few sketches for a church tower which will show up in the game, settling on the rightmost one.

Spoiler

For what better place is there for a sniper to have an (anti)climatic showdown than atop a church tower?

[close]

I wish for the setting to have a somewhat ambiguous feel while still being recognizably eastern European.
I also added a big clock face,
and I hope to make an homage to the Edgar Allan Poe short story A Predicament (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Predicament)!

Now, while it may not really have anything to do with the game, I read in the newspapers that the Belorussian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. Her book, War's Unwomanly Face, has been one of my sources of inspiration for this game with interviews of female war veterans providing an unconventional perspective on the second world war and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
(I also recommend anyone interested in lavish ballgowns to watch the prize ceremony on tv on the 10th of December, but for some reason this interest rarely overlaps with WWII or computer games. )

Another source of inspiration has been Call of Duty: World at war, also an interesting, though very different, depiction of war. I hope that a game inspired by cartoons, blockbuster action and award-winning literature will be memorable, but if not I'm at least having fun making this game.

I think the hair makes her arm look really long as it creates the illusion that it is one long arm coming out of her chest.  At first I mistook it as coming out from almost the same point as the other arm and being very wierd and very long.

Not matter how many times I look at it again it always looks like the girl's left arm is a tentacle

Like this?

I think it's the hair making that illusion. The guy's knees look a bit odd too,
but otherwise it's a fine picture and I really like their faces and expressions.

The spotter-animation is smother but I think the snipers animation tells the story better, which I think is the more important thing.

In both animations the character falls like a tree, while in reality they would fall more like a puppet that has its strings cut.
Something more like this;
(GIMP with a combination of copy-paste-rotate and redrawing)
By putting longer show time on the the first and last frames of the animation you get a better feeling for how this type of animation will look in action.

I'm all for the hand drawn one!
The other pixelates in the rotated frames, they do give a different style of "cartoonist" effect though. As in "stiff vs. smooth"... However players might look at it as in "lazy vs. hard work" style animation.

I am very grateful for your input! I am thinking of a somewhat stylized approach but not without some sense of reality. Great gif by the way!
I also didn't think of combining copy-pasting and redrawing, I will try to experiment. (I have also begun experimenting with Spriter, but it will probably take a while before I learn to use that properly.)
Perhaps I will even add a few more death animations for variety!


The spotter doesn't seem equally excited about this prospect though.

What cat said, plus I'll add that that fridge is very very small... Double it that should make it look more realistic.

I agree, I is small. Or is the door supposed to be unusually large?
How does it look compared to the characters of the game? (If the game is supposed to have visible characters that is...)
Otherwise the background has a clean and polished feel and I like the color scheme, but the floor looks a bit empty.
Some lines or a tile pattern maybe?

It looks dazzling! Are those skyscrapers built out of disco balls?
It sure is an excellent contrast to the slums and junkyards in the previous pictures,
for it is one thing to read about a class society, and another to see it.

I have made a new animation, though this time I used a slightly different approach compared to the sniper's death animation.

With the sniper I rotated different parts of the image in gimp, while here I did a new image from scratch for each frame of the animation,
just like the hand-drawn Disney classics, apart from the fact that this was made by an amateur with Photoshop and a non-existent budget. (The scale, quality and subject matter might differ too.)
Which method looks best?

I just checked it out on steam, and everything I've seen of this game so far seems great!

It looks pretty neat though the repaint makes for a pretty different character interpretation,
in the top image the character was wearing what looked like a black shirt and red tie like some
kind of emo/punk-rock look, but in the new image the character seems dressed up for a white collar job.
What's the story of the game?

I just finished the game and I must say it's a really great game, love the indy vibes!

What part of the mirror puzzle did you find unintuitive?

Yes, it was never explained that you could double-click the mirror.
Also, the word puzzle would have been a really great puzzle if only the entire title of the movie
had been written out in the dialog menu.
As for the note puzzle I just completed it.

A nice game but the puzzles so far does't feel entirely intuitive, like the word-puzzle Shadow1000 mentioned and I had trouble with the mirror in the clothes shop, not because I missed a clue, but because I couldn't figure out the game mechanics for knocking and only discovered how to do it through random luck.

Spoiler

I'm stuck with the note found inside the knife. I found the other note with the letters already crossed out and I figured that I'm supposed to cross out the letters in accordance to the numbers in the top corner of the note somehow, but I don't understand exactly how the numbers are supposed to work and I can't see any pattern.

[close]

The art in a game can really make or break the mood, so I say that you should make
your decision based on what kind of feelings you wish to evoke. The first picture
shows rust and cracks and colors while the second picture feels more bright and
clean but also more artificial.What kind of story do you want to tell?
While the first picture is more atmospheric the second one is
more unique and might make the game stand out in the crowd.

I just finished the game and I absolutely loved the clean retro-futuristic aesthetic combined with bombastic classical music,
a real artwork in my opinion. And using separate short stories combined was an interesting narrative approach which has been
sadly underutilized within the the game medium. I really liked this game!

I love these guys a loooot! I'm really happy you're going with that chunky outline look for the ingame sprites, it's what I like!

Great to hear that you like them, Eggie!

The jerrycan is a WW2 word. That was what the Americans called the fuel container the Germans used (jerry=german). It was technically a much better construction than what the Americans and British used at that time. Maybe there is something in that, that you could use in the story.

I figured that since the game takes place in a town occupied by German forces it probably wouldn't be too strange if they left some equipment behind as well. And according to Wikipedia the soviets copied the design and and jerry-cans are apparently common in Russia to this very day. No idea what they are called in Russian though, so it's probably a good thing that everyone in the game speaks English for the convenience of the audience. And the convenience of me. Mostly the convenience of me.

Also, I like your suggestion for the puzzle, it seems more straightforward.

Yes, I tried using spriter a bit as well, and it seems like a really great tool. I am very grateful that I saw the tip by Grok.

I have made quite a few new sprites and thought that I could post one of them.

Yes, as a complete surprise to none and none at all, a game set in WWII will have Nazis as the enemy, though not all the German soldiers our titular sniper and spotter encounter will be enthusiastic about being drafted into the war to end up as cannon fodder. Since this is an adventure game, and not say an fps, rts or rpg, the player will likely focus more on evasion rather than combat, but this game is set in a war zone and it will feature blood and violence and the characters can be killed if they make the wrong decision on the battlefield.
After all, this is a ridiculously exaggerated cartoon satire, not a fantasy game.