Author Archives: Matt Roszak

EBF Collection: Achievements

Hey guys, the Epic Battle Fantasy Collection is going to have almost 150 achievements in total, more than any other game I’ve made! It’s gonna be great for anyone who plays games just for Steam achievements, since it won’t take too long to get them all.

All of the original Newgrounds medals will be in there, plus some games will have a couple of new ones. The Kitten Game has never had achievements before on any platform, so it’s getting a completely new set. Cat Cafe’s in-game medals are pretty grindy, so I’ll probably make the Steam achievements easier than those. I’ll also make sure that you don’t need to beat EBF1 and 2 on every difficulty anymore – Epic will be enough.

You’ll have the option to delete medals for each game separately. I still get complaints about Epic Battle Fantasy 4 not having a simple way to delete medals, so I’m not going to forget that feature again.

I’ve also remade all of the achievement icons in HD!
A lot of the icons needed to be remade anyway – some contained copyrighted characters, and some were very low-effort. I’ve kept the spirit of the originals, but many will be shinier now.

The standard size for web game achievements was 50×50 pixels, and Steam uses 64×64, but I figured I would future-proof them and go for 128×128. I’m making the most of this and displaying them quite large in the launcher interface.

EBF Collection: Sketchbook

Hey guys, I’ve finished updating Sketchbook for the Epic Battle Fantasy Collection. It’s an interactive sketchbook that originally contained 100 pages of traditional drawings, but now has almost 200. I’ve also improved the interface to allow for faster navigation, and added new music by Phyrnna.

There’s not much else to say about it. You’ve probably seen most of the art in there if you’ve been following me closely for 10+ years, and now it’s all in one place.

EBF Collection: Main Menu

Hey guys, the launcher interface is pretty much finished now. It’s time for me to start programming the achievements and resolution options.

Here’s what the main menu looks like at the moment, to remind you which games are gonna be in the collection.

I think there’s around 8 hours of content in there if you play through the games casually, probably double that if you want to get every achievement, plus a decent amount of replay value.

EBF Collection: Launcher

Hey guys, I’m working on the launcher for the Epic Battle Fantasy Collection. It essentially functions like a Flash games website, letting you select a game, view some information, and then launch it. I think it looks pretty cool so far, and it’s coming along quickly.

I suspect the most frustrating part is going to be getting different game resolutions running correctly, especially since every game has a different, and often nonsensical, aspect ratio. None of them were designed to be played in full-screen mode.

Not sure how I’m gonna handle that.

Pixel Golems

Hey guys, I was wondering if tracing over EBF art would make drawing pixel art faster… but nope, not really. If you set a swf file to low quality and scale it down, you’ve essentially got aliased pixel art, but it’s very messy and requires so much clean up, that I basically ended up redrawing everything. These golems are the biggest pixel creatures I’ve drawn so far, and they took way longer than all the others for sure. I really wonder if pixel artists get much faster with practice, cause what you see below took a little more than a day to do. Animating pixel art of this quality must take a painful amount of time, especially since you often can’t motion tween it like with other 2D art. I can see why most games doing pixel art stick to Terraria levels of detail and animation quality.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll eventually make a game using all the pixel art I’ve been doing, but the foes definitely won’t have more than 2 animation frames.

Anyone tried doing pixel art? How long does it take for you?