Hey there!

It’s a new year and it’s already been full of excitement for the Andrecca team. We’ve recently started to move towards working on the user interface (UI), for the game. I’ve still been working on art and even branching out into other pixel art projects too.

As far as the UI goes, we want it to feel unique yet comfortable to play no matter what controller is being used. We’ve just started tweaking the UI and it’s going really well as far as what buttons to use and setting up how it will look for the player(s). Making use of the negative space on the screen without it looking cluttered, is not as much of a challenge as I thought it would be. The space we have is not huge, but I think with the options we’ll have on the screen, it won’t feel cluttered or crowded. It’s really coming along nicely, and quickly too. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some screenshots soon!

The art I’ve been working on is really more of doodles and it’s been a lot of fun.
When I started working on pixel art I had studied sprite sheets from old SNES games, but I didn’t know where to begin making my own art. Now (thanks to the internet), I’ve done a lot of studying of techniques and really started to practice some skills. I try to doodle everyday even if it’s something I’m not using in the game. The picture I added is a little tile that I lovingly call “Purple Butter”. I don’t think this piece will be used in the game, but it does use some of the basic techniques I’ve been honing in the past few weeks. It’s a simple rectangle that I created based on some isometric squares I had been working on. I also did a little dithering on this “butter” to give it a little more life and add a little whimsy to it. I really love it! It’s simple and fun, but I don’t feel it has a definite place or use in the game so I thought I would share it with you guys here. This way even though it may not be in the game you can get a little taste of what I’ve been working on.
In the game I’ve been working with 32×32 pixel squares, and while I’ve gotten used to that size, I want to branch out a little to push myself. Today I’m starting to work on a project of doodling a 100×100 pixel square a day, and then at some point I’ll connect them all together into a kind of a digital art piece. When I do have the piece created I’ll be sure to share it here with you all.

Recently we’ve been talking about the game, and once it’s finished how it will play. I really think it’s going to be a game that will keep regular gamers on their toes, but also be something that a new gamer can pick up and have fun with from the start. Once the game is finished, it’s definitely going to be a flippin’ fun time!

Team Survival Game Type

Last post I talked about the general overview of Andrecca and touched a little on the experiences we want to create. Today I’m going to dive in a little more into the actual gameplay.

Andrecca is an action-puzzle game inspired by a lot of games from our past and even some from the current generation of games. At the core, it plays in a similar style to Mendel Palace from the NES, where you will control a character on a board, which is divided into multiple squares (like a chess board) and you slide tiles (the squares) around to reveal secrets, defeat enemies and find power ups. We feel that this is a great and forgotten genre of gameplay that needs to be revived and have its additional potential tapped into.

One area we see potential in is in multiplayer. Some of my favorite games from the past and present are great because of the multiplayer in them, whether you’re playing a co-op campaign, battling each other as teams or just a straight free-for-all, it just adds layers of depth and enjoyment that you just can’t create with singleplayer and AI. Not to say there’s anything wrong with those singleplayer games, there are lots of amazing singleplayer experiences out there. So many that it’s a big part of the reason we want to focus a lot on multiplayer. A lot of indie games seem to focus on singleplayer and even a lot of the Wii U multiplayer games only focus on local multiplayer. That’s where we want to be different and give players the option of playing online with family and friends if they’d like and we want to deliver the best online experience that we can.

It’s the feature that I’m looking at the most right now. Local multiplayer hasn’t even been implemented yet. I want to create a good base for online first, make sure it works, and the build the rest of the game around it. To me, it’s a better choice than the alternative, where the game is built first and online is just tacked on later. A lot of times the online experience just isn’t as great and players really can feel how tacked on it is. We want to create an experience where you can have those “living room full of friends and family” moments AND extend those moments online once everyone else has to go home.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted here, we’ve had a lot going on in our personal and work lives, but we haven’t stopped working on Andrecca! Anyway, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Andrew and I’m the other half of the Andrecca team. I work a lot more with the coding and game mechanics side of things. When the time comes for an open beta – something we’d very much like to do in the near-ish future – I’m sure we’ll get to know one another better while I do my best to keep the bugs at bay!

So this is just a little bit about Andrecca (Working title for our game) and what kind of game we’re trying to make. Becca and I both came from the generation raised by Nintendo, where you could just enjoy games for hours at a time especially with friends and family to play with. That grew bonds between everyone playing and sometimes rivalries (the good kind!). We’ve since grown into the age where you can connect with anyone at anytime almost anywhere in the world. We want to create a game that embraces the best of both of these great worlds.

We often find ourselves searching for a game where we can play together as a team and overcome challenges together and join up or challenge other friends and family online when we want. There are some games out there that let us do this, but a lot of times they only allow for local play or each player needs to be on their own console or PC to play online. That’s generally not feasible for us and I’m sure plenty of people are in that same boat.

When thinking of the best platform to create such an experience, it didn’t take us a lot of thought, Nintendo would be our dream platform. What a better platform to develop for than the one that created the experiences that we’re going to pay tribute to? So when the opportunity came up to develop for the Wii U, we just had to take it!

Andrecca is going to be very retro (16-bit era) in nature but will still have a lot of the conveniences of modern day. We’re really excited to start showing off more in the posts to come!