Anachron

Dungeon Crawler Roguelike Multiplayer Game

in Development

I am the creator and director on an ongoing passion project video game, alongside my brother Matthew Walton, who is in charge of the sound and music departments.

Anachron is an upcoming roguelike dungeon crawler featuring 2D pixel art sprite-based characters in procedurally and infinite generated 3D environments. All assets I am designing by hand. The style we want for the sprites dictates a 1:1 scale of resolution with the characters and background, as well as no pixel rotation, so each character has many frames needing manual animation to account for various loadout combinations. I’ve drawn over 14237 frames as of June 2023.

Set in a fantasy world, Anachron follows a ragtag party of treasure hunters on a quest to recover the mythical Anachron, an ancient magical device used to distort and manipulate the flow of time.

Players can join teammates in a cozy tavern called the Greasy Goblin Tavern, and delve deep together into the torturous depths of an infinite dungeon, using magic lanterns capable of manipulating the direction of time to solve traps and puzzles and defeat increasingly difficult enemies to try in vain to reach the elusive Anachron.

The team is small and there is no funding, all work is out of pocket, and as a true artist, I am mostly living paycheck to paycheck, so the production rate is slower than I’d like, but we’re making steady progress when we are able! Very excited to get this out to the world.

Learning everything I can about Unreal Engine 5 to make the game.

Multi-directional walk cycle of a character with a one-handed sword.

Normal maps enabling lighting to affect 2D sprites.

Sprites will have normal maps, enabling the assets to be affected by 3D lighting.

Multi-directional walk cycle of a character with a two-handed club.

Multi-directional walk cycle of a character with a bow.

Arms are missing because they are modular, but showcasing sprite compatibility with bunny hopping and falling longer distances.

Some assets that need collision will be 3D models but keep the 1:1 pixel resolution scale with the 2D sprites.

3D arrows since the player should be able to fire in 360 degrees in 3D space.

Debug room on older game build showcasing the 2D character in 3D space. This build is no longer to be used but it shows a preview of the original vision.

I decided to create a VR-compatible model based on a 2D sprite. Fully rigged!

3D coins post-processed to resemble pixel art... A test for coin physics.

Concept art of a dwarf-like miner character!

It's a chicken... not much to explain here.