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posts tagged with: art

Dev Log: Art Stylin'

Dev Log: Art Stylin'
While being sick I've done about 0 programming work. There's a lot of programming work to be done on Sky Sisters, so I tried to do some quick art tests for my dice game instead.

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I'm playing around with the idea of super high res pixel art inspired by Jesse Turner on Viking Squad. The style seems incredibly powerful for a high resolution game with art done by just one person.

One of the things I've learned while working on Sky Sisters is that I really miss the flexibility of pixel art in regards to manipulating it after it's already on the canvas. Changing the color of high res art requires a lot of preparation and layers, while with pixel art the paint bucket tool can do the job. Having this flexibility with high resolution assets seems really promising!

Right now I'm working at double size and scaling it down for the actual in game asset. I usually do this for any of my high resolution assets, but in this case it gets me a little bit of anti-aliasing for the final in game asset. I might actually increase it more and try something like quadruple resolution for the source, but I don't know if I actually have to get that crazy.
dev log art
Posted March 30th 2016 3:19 PM (General)
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Dev Log: More Animations!

Dev Log: More Animations!
It looks like both of the players in Super Sky Sisters now have animations! I never thought the day would come but I think from the power of streaming I finally pulled it off. It was exactly as draining and soul crushing as I thought it would be, but I think I got some animations that aren't terrible.

So here's the player two angel from Sky Sisters in her fully animated glory:

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With GDC around the corner I don't think I'm going to get any more updates in before then. I'm starting to feel the itch to return to my RPG idea as well, so we'll see how I'm feeling after GDC is all said and done. I still kinda don't have any idea of what to do with Super Sky Sisters aside from trying to maybe sell it on itch or humble and probably sell like 10 copies, but who knows!
art sky sisters dev log
Posted March 9th 2016 4:46 PM (General)
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Dev Log: It's Happening!

Dev Log: It's Happening!
Today I finally started on a task on Sky Sisters that has been on my to do list since the very beginning: player animations!

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I got all the sprites for player one done today on my stream. It started out pretty rough, but I think I have something I'm actually happy with. There's some minor adjustments to be made, like the line thicknesses of some of the frames, but that should be easy enough to fix up.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to finish the frames of player two, and maybe even implement all the animations in the game. After that if I can clean up the lines and other small issues, then the animations will be done and it will be one step closer to being a complete game that I'm happy enough with to release.

But with Game Developers Conference coming up, I probably wont have anything done before then. Also, uh, at some point I need to figure out what the music is going to be in this game...
dev log sky sisters art
Posted March 2nd 2016 5:58 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Sky Sisters Sky

Dev Log: Sky Sisters Sky
Over the past week or so I sat down with my twitch stream and worked on a new background for Super Sky Sisters. Check it out!

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One of the most common pieces of feedback I was getting is that the sky was not really as cool as everything else in the game, and over time I agreed more and more with that feedback so I finally ripped it out and did an all new one. I think I liked the look of the old one still, but it wasn't coming across as that great, so out it goes.

The old sky looked like this:

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Not too bad, but I think this is definitely an improvement. There's a lot more character and life in this new sky!
sky sisters art streaming
Posted February 22nd 2016 4:06 PM (General)
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Exploring Explosions Talk

Exploring Explosions Talk
Last night I spent an hour or so talking about explosions! It was an internet talk that I gave from the comfort of my room to the fine folks at Warp Zone in Louisville Kentucky.



All the materials from the talk can be found here if you want to follow along with the animations and video footage.

It was a lot of fun to put together the talk, and get to share my excitement over particle effects to other game developers!
gamedev art programming design
Posted February 19th 2016 1:13 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Arranging Pixels

Dev Log: Arranging Pixels
I've been taking kind of a longer break from coding than I would like, but I suppose while I'm able to I can just roll with the punches and do whatever my weird brain wants to do. I've tried to refocus on my dice RPG like game by trying to figure out some art stuff for it.

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I've been drawing from some Zelda games as inspiration for this top downish kind of view. My idea is that there will be an overworld area and when you encounter an enemy it goes into the dice battle. The overworld will also have other neat interactions with the dice that I haven't totally figured out yet, but I have some rough ideas.

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One thing I'm stuggling with is just the overall screen size of the game and trying to do pixel art. I need a high-ish resolution for the dice, I feel, because I want them to have large icons and be very readable, and I also need room for a lot of UI stuff... but this big screen resolution means the overworld can look pretty zoomed out. Right now each movement tile size is 32 pixels, while each art tile is 16 pixels.

I'm trying to put the overworld "game" into a smaller portion on the screen of 640 x 480 because I actually like 4 x 3 way better for 2d games, and I'm trying to compensate for the "zoomed out" feeling. I could try increasing the tilesize, but 64 pixels is too large, and 48 pixels feels weird (it's not a power of 2, blasphemy!)

I think I'll roll with this idea for now, and put a bunch of hud and menu stuff over on the left. I kinda think back on how Desktop Dungeons did it with a square game view and the side of the screen being all HUD, and I think that works out nicely.

The size of your screen and how many "tiles" fit across horizontally and vertically can very heavily inform the feeling of your game! Limiting how "far" the player can see is a very important thing to consider, as it will then inform all of your level design and art choices. That's... probably a rant for another time though.
dev log art
Posted January 28th 2016 1:43 PM (General)
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