Humble Beginnings Part 2

Here is an early example of the 2D, 3D parallax scrolling effect we have on most of the levels in Quest Runner, the Pokke Mines shows off the effect particularly well.

Many of the levels feature multiple levels of parallax scrolling and/or a SNES era Mode 7 like effects on the background.

Humble Beginnings Part 1

A very old school screenshot of us working out what to do about Health bars and UI.  Looked pretty generic back then as well as the non-customizable player characters.

Some of these elements stuck in the final game, but became much more polished and user friendly.



Grif the Ranger

Grif here is one of the mercenaries you can hire in the game, a level 15 Merc his shotgun is pretty powerful and it helps him keep his distance from enemies.

EP:One

http://questrunner.bandcamp.com/
Check a preview of the Soundtrack which will be free to download once the Game is Completed.

Iterations

The Golblin Forest went thru several looks before I decided on the final look, which also had to work in game as well as take up as little memory as possible while looking nice at same time.

Humble beginnings...

...seems a little scary or too moody...

...looks more jungle than forest...

...and almost final.

8-Bit Beginnings

At first I wanted to make a game that resemble 8-bit graphics from NES era videogames, but with a bit more modern tech to them. 

Eventually we decided not to go in this direction, sprite art takes a surprisingly long time to create if you want to do it well.

Torma Town

Quest Runner started out with a very sketchy and loose style, Torma Town was one of the first areas I drew for it which looked like this...

Its got character but a bit childish looking kinda too loose...so a few iterations later Torma now looks like this...

Much classier, with many adventures waiting to be had, the town a bit bigger than it apears here with only the important stuff being interactive.

Getting Around

The world map went thru a few iterations, the world in Quest Runner at first was one connected in a way that if you ran thru all the levels you would eventually circle back around at where you started.

The Prototype version of the map reflected how the all the levels would be connected and loop around.

Here the visuals have been improved, but something still didn't quite work with the map.  In the end we decided to go with a different layout for it, which I post more about later.

Polish and Style

We've been updating some of the old art with new fancy more stylized artwork.  While working on the game I made over 75 characters during the course of development, my drawings and style got better as time went by.
So I decided to make improvments to older characters to match some of the better style of the latest characters.

The Rouge here is one of the mercenaries you can hire to help you in the game, his older version had a slight charm to him even if he was a bit derpy.

The Ranger got a style boost too, some reason they were all dwarfs before, I did keep the Rangers' blank stare like he loooking directly at you thru the screen....yes he looking right at you.

8-bit Nostalgia

We pay homage to some of our favorite games in many places in Quest Runner, The Legend of Zelda being one of our favorites.

There are several places in the game where we use Zelda references wonder if players can find them all?

Environments

A small section of one of the many levels in quest runner, feature smooth parallax scrolling with a subtle 3D effect when playing on the devices.

Soundtrack

We are going to make a couple of Soundtrack EP's free to Download, this is a preview of the cover for the first one.

Animations

A small preview of the Quality of the 2D animations in the game, actually smoother on the device.