Hey friends! Over the last few months we’ve been focusing on one thing more than anything else: movement.

Not just making characters move from point A to point B, but trying to make every action feel drawn by hand in a way that still reads clearly during gameplay. That balance has been harder than we expected.

A lot of modern 2D pipelines are built around rigs, reusable parts, and efficiency. Those tools are great, but early on we realized they weren’t giving us the feeling we wanted. The game started from sketchbooks and rough animation tests, so when movement became too clean or too procedural it immediately lost some of its personality.

So we made the slightly unreasonable decision to animate almost everything frame by frame.

Most of that work happens in Photoshop.

Which is probably not the first software people think of for animation.

Photoshop isn’t really built as a dedicated animation package and sometimes it reminds us of that constantly. The timeline can be awkward, file management gets messy fast, and there are definitely more specialized tools out there. But after years of drawing in it, the process feels immediate to us. We can sketch, paint, animate, and iterate in the same place without breaking concentration.

That matters more than we expected.

A lot of the game’s motion comes from roughness and instinct. Tiny inconsistencies between frames, uneven line weight, shapes drifting slightly off model and those imperfections end up making things feel alive. Working directly in Photoshop keeps that handmade quality intact because the animation process still feels close to drawing on paper.

It also forces us to think differently about scope.

Hand-drawn animation is slow. Really slow.

Every enemy, attack, transition, and effect has to justify the amount of time it takes to make. We’ve had to simplify designs, cut ideas that looked good in still images but were impossible to animate efficiently, and learn where detail actually matters during gameplay. A clean silhouette and readable motion usually matter more than excessive rendering.

That process has been healthy for the project overall. Constraints tend to expose what’s actually important.

On the engine side, we decided pretty early to build the game in Godot.

Part of that was practical. As a small team we needed something lightweight, flexible, and easy to iterate with. But the bigger reason was that Godot feels approachable in a way that encouraged experimentation instead of fighting the engine.

Since so much of the game depends on animation and responsiveness, iteration speed matters constantly. We need to be able to import new frames, test timing changes, rebuild attacks, or completely replace animations without the pipeline becoming a wall between ideas and the game itself.

Godot has been great for that so far.

Right now we’re deep in the process of refining combat animations and enemy behavior. A lot of what we’re learning comes down to clarity: how to make attacks readable without losing the loose, hand-drawn energy we care about.

Some things look beautiful in isolation and completely fail once the game speeds up.

Other animations that felt too simple in Photoshop suddenly feel perfect once they’re in motion during combat.

That back-and-forth between drawing and implementation has basically become the rhythm of development.

And honestly, seeing these sketchbook drawings finally move around on screen has been one of the most rewarding parts of the whole project so far.

Thank you for following our journey, we can’t wait to share more!

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