Hi everyone. It’s been a while since the last update, and much of that time was spent reinventing the visual presentation of Vision ~ SR. My own art that I had been making was not meeting the quality standards the game deserves. So here I welcome Arron Johnson, a skilled sprite artist that has been working on improving the in-game assets. It took some discussion, but eventually we decided on a great new look for the game, a taste of which is below.
Pretty much everything has changed; from the UI elements to the ship to Oracle herself. The way Oracle is rendered was even modified. Instead of an ordinary sprite sheet, there are now two separate sprite sheets used to animate Oracle: one for the upper body (e.g. aiming) and one for the lower body (e.g. running). It’s a simpler workflow on both the artistic and technical sides, allowing me to easily change the stance of Oracle’s legs based on the slope of the platfrom she’s standing on. It’s a nice feature you don’t see in many sprite-based games.
Other characters have gotten face-lifts as well, while still retaining my original vision for them. We also finally got profile images for the text area, handily provided by concept artist Molly (who you might remember from the previous update).
The island tilesets and backgrounds have received improvements as well. Levels are being reworked to account for the new look of these assets, and they are not quite ready to be shown off yet. But the slightly-obscured screenshot below shows a bit of what it’ll look like.
With the revamp it’s only fitting to update the .gifs on the Gameplay page that explain some of Vision ~ SR’s key features. Here’s the new .gif of the Flashback mechanic:
And below is the new .gif showing the Vision mechanic. The shader rendering the silhouettes also changed; now they appear as a solid gray color rather than a grayscale version of the sprite. This was done to reduce noise and more clearly differentiate the difference between attacks and their intangible visions.
By contrast, here are the old versions of these animations:
Quite the difference, wouldn’t you say? I’m excited to think it’ll only get better from here.
Vision Soft Reset 