Flask & Barrel

Hi everyone, this is my first post on here.   I made up this site to start sharing what I have been working on for quite some time. I started this project about 2 years ago in my free time between classes and work, and have been slowly improving it through the years. This started out as a small sailing simulator based on a flash game that I found one day, and has changed significantly. About a year into the project, I shifted away from a specific purpose, and instead decided to just start making a 2D engine in C#. I went through a lot of game ideas (sailing sim to JRPG to Retro City Rampage clone to 2D Red Dead Redemption... you get the idea). I decided to focus on creating an engine that could run my game and do everything I thought I'd need it to do to prepare for creating an actual game one day. I'm at a point now where I believe the engine is done -- or at least done enough -- and it's time to put it to the test. I've decided on my game, and here she is! I've go

 Hi everyone, So it's been a while. I'm back with another update. Before I get into that, today is the one year anniversary of my first post on this site so there's some celebration to be had there. 2022 will also mark 3 years since the PixelEngine in its current state came about, so cheers to that as well. To make up for the lack of updates the past 4 months, this one is jam packed, and is a full v0.X release. Let's start out with the obvious, the new art. I've added quite a few new things to the game. We have trees and vegetation now, as well as several new buildings and ground tiles. I've been trying to pick up the pace with the art so I don't get buried in it.     Next up, I have added the framework for NPCs into the game. Currently they're very basic, but they can walk around and the player can interact with them (right now they just have some arbitrary dialogue appear over there head when you interact with them). From here it will be very easy to a

Hi!   Back again with another post. I said I would try to do these posts about once a month, unfortunately I've been traveling quite a lot for work the past several weeks, limiting my time to work on this project. Time constraints aside, I wanted to take this opportunity to show you what I've been doing, but also go into some more detail about the game concept and the engine itself. If you've been following my ever changing Trello board you may know what I've been up to the past month. In my game, inspired by movies like Kiki's Delivery Service and Mary and the Witch's Flower, the player will be able to brew potions, gather ingredients, and sell them to eager customers. Potions in this game are a little more "scientific" than the classic black  cauldron filled with green bubbling liquid. In this game, the player will brew the potions in a process more similar to brewing beer or distilling spirits. Using large machines and special ingredients, the loca