Devlog #1 - Part 1 - Art

First thing to get out of the way when rebooting is to check your constraints. I can't draw to save my life, so I can't produce art, even if I really wanted, it just won't end up as I want it.

I started by using some sprites from Spriters Resource to make my characters, from Streets of Rage 3 but soon after I found them to not be able to produce what I want in the end run due to the low amount of sprites one can try and mix match to make up the animations.

After a bit I was joined by Tiago Tavares and we came to the conclusion that maybe a different set of sprites, this time we turned to King of Fighters XI due to the huge amount of characters available and all of them have a huge amount of sprites to work with, and are still using, at this current point.

So this fixed our problem with making new characters and if we can make the sprites they have fit, now with a huge selection it's just a matter of time and patience to cycle through what is there and work with it, but now the problem was the rest, what to do with the background? How does the floor work? What are we actually doing?

At the time we were only working with a simple plane to move around the characters, but the intention was to make a floor that resembled a Beat Em Up Stage and have the character move from left to right, have some sprites on the ground, some sprites on the background, maybe change them a bit, and voila, awesome level.

Well, that wasn't working out very well and we ended up with something like this:

This was actually a later version of what it was, before it was just a huge long sprite that would be the level, but that wasn't very maneuverable. There was also some graphical glitching but that was fixed by changing the sprite orders.

Tiago Tavares then gave me an idea, if we couldn't just "reuse" the street, I had abandoned those sprites because I didn't know what to do with a long sprite, but with the "reuse" I just thought of segmenting a sprite into various "same sized" sprites, that maybe I could cycle?

So that's when I thought of the "infinite" aspect, if I always have a set of sprites, can't I just pick one at random and cycle it? But what about other stages? 

At this point we set out to grab some background sprites, courtesy of Jebo14, and slice and paste them around to make 100x(×)  pixel sprites that we could use as a ground and background and ended up with two very basic levels and a transition between them that resulted in this:

At the point of this clip, we only had 2 levels to cycle through, but the system is made in such a way that to add a new stage segment, one only requires the sprites and to make scriptable objects to link to the main level container, so to accommodate new levels we require 0 code and there is no dependency on a game object, present in the current scene, "Singleton Manager", at the start of the run, only references already present on our assets and that we build as we go, adding new characters/stages.