Legacy Update - Design Insights (Patreon)

Happy New Year, Patrons! 

We hope the first couple weeks of 2026 have been kind to you 🫶 We’re cooking up some juicy new stuff for the Monthly Update at the end of January, but we missed y’all and couldn’t stay away too long! 

So, here’s a little throwback treat with interesting (and slightly cursed) behind-the-scenes design insights from the team 🤭

Designwork Sneak Peek (2024)

For something new that we haven’t featured before, here’s a sneak peek of a design-in-progress for a specific character’s Monster form! 🐔

Designing for game development is much more restricted than one might assume, especially since TOUCHSTARVED has a specific art style we need to adhere to with regards to fidelity of detail, blackwork, and texturization. One of our goals is to translate the hand-brushed feeling from the concept art to the final production assets. 

We hope you feel the amount of care we put into each art asset, because every stage is a huge labor of love!

Development Update (2024)

As you all know, one large part of the development process involves creating our own tools from scratch in order to improve the efficiency of game production and to create original visuals and features. Previously, we talked about our handy PSB Loader, which was a massive boon for us as we steadily increase our sprite asset count. 

Recently, we’ve been investigating whether effect parameters (such as blur, position, zoom, depth of field) can be applied to multiple elements on screen at the same time.

Here’s a GIF of what we mean. The ability to layer different effects onto different object levels will give us the ability to make TOUCHSTARVED a much more cinematic experience. 

We decided to investigate this feature because we wanted to explore how to create more movement with static images, given that camera shakes and panning backgrounds can only do so much. TOUCHSTARVED is full of action, violence, mystery, and horror; it’s hard to sell some heavy emotional beats with a static sprite and background… but even with limited resources, there are always crafty solutions we can try. 

This exploration in particular was a massive collaboration between our art and tech teams. We’ve found that the more collaboration between those two disciplines exist, the wider and brighter the world of game development gets. While very different, an artist and a programmer working together can be the strongest sword 🔥

In the future, we're excited to show backers more explorations like this and to hopefully utilize these features in the full game. We’re always searching for ways to impress you all. Thank you for your endless support.