So, after many late nights of pouring over options, photoshopping my little Cow onto all manner of screenshots, and reflecting on the type of game I wanted to make - the die is cast! I've decided to go with a nice fun stylised graphics style, as not only is it much easier to make, but I finally decided it just matched the whole fantasy animal game I wanted to make anyway. Rather than trying to polish everything to the best of my (programmer) abilities as I go, my plan is to try and get a "good enough to play" look for things, and then come back at the end and revise and polish as much or little as I want to (or have time to).

Here's an unfinished test room, with the first fir trees:



There still a bit I need to do, even to get to workable graphics (cliff tiles are just standins, there are a few missing grass border pieces, and the I want to add some more varieties of fir like trunks, long trunks, shorter bodies, etc) - but this is one of the first screenshots where I can see my game - as opposed to a prototype, which is pretty cool.

Another thing I'm keen to do is make the world itself a lot less "inert" - I want trees to wobble and sway when something hits them, I want flowers to wave around wildly as you march through them, etc. To this end, I've started to think about how I'm going to implement "composite" physics bodies so I can build an armature inside these trees and then wire it up with some spring constraints. My goal is to use the same system to do ragdolls and secondary animation (like pony tails, etc). I'm not expecting to have this up and running for a bit though.

Cheers!