Guys, girls,

I've never believed that I would find joy in creating a video game. To be honest, the first launch of the game was propelled by mere curiosity in coding and drawing. As the project developed, more and more ideas came to my mind and, with them, I gradually immersed myself in tutorials, new design tools and learning of video game production skills that I would never thought to practice in my life.

Now, I'm creating a video game that evolved to something greater. At least for me, fellows haha.

I decided to begin with Devlogs for two reasons. The first one is to record progress of this project I decided to begin so I can keep track of all work made. Secondly, I want you to know my work. As you, I'm also a human being that needs to bring food to the table and to pay some bills, of course. If you're interested in the future of this game, stick to the Devlogs I intend to publish every week or two weeks. If you believe in my work and want to support me, you're welcome on Crystal Hearts Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/crystalhearts

Also, In a near future I will be launching a Discord Channel so as to publish new announcements and to grow a community. But, for now, I'm still learning how to use it haha.

I'm not a native English speaker. I'm learning, and I'm learning well, but I will surely make some grammar and vocabulary mistakes. I promise to do my best.

Now let's talk about the game. 

• Crystal Hearts isn't anymore a 2D game. I realized that I was losing my head drawing animations frame by frame. Classic animations is a whole art and some artists are doing awesome jobs with that. But isn't for me. So Crystal Hearts is now a full 3D graphics game. So I present you the new Parvati, main character of CH.

(InGame footage)

For the model creation, I've been playing with Blender. I discovered a strong taste for digital sculpting and I realized that I have good skills to sculpt.

I leave below some screenshots from the sculpt process.

• After sculpting Parvati, so as to make a playable 3D model, some retopology adjustments must be done. Because computers cannot manage huge quantities of polygons, it's needed to significantly reduce data. In my case, I finally got 7.8k polygons for the model. As you can see, the final version of Parvati isn't that fancy.

However, so as to bring up to life the model, all original details can be baked into the simplified version so as to get something more beautiful. I added colors using Substance Painter. It's a good tool. It simplified a lot of work. However, the downside of it is its price. I used the trial version to test the software, but in the future I should search for Open Source alternatives.

Finally, we have the animation process. The model must be rigged to a "skeleton" that can be posed and, then, animated.

• Crystal Hearts migrated from platform. Because the first project was based on 2D graphics, I started with Godot. Also, I had better experience programming in Python. However, as the project evolved to 3D, I thought that Godot wasn't be able to give me all support to manage 3D graphics. That is why I'm now using Unity and coding in C#. The learning curve was hard to achieve, but I managed to well understand C# by reading and watching tutorials. 
• For the game mechanics I decided to keep the side scrolling concept. Since I've been hard working on 3D models I think that it is possible to convert the original idea into a game with 3D navigation. Just a guess...

At this point, the post is long enough. I will post about game mechanics and Unity integration next time.

I would appreciate hearing all your comments and opinions.

- Gum