The deadline for the IGF – the Independent Games Festival – is a week away, and then the other competition we are excited about, on IndiePub.com, is at the end of the month. So we’ve been working non-stop to get a build out for that. I’m really excited about the new build: It’s got a nice smooth progression, none of this throw-everything-we-have-into-every-level stuff. Instead, it walks you through it gradually, so that each new level adds just one new thing or trick or weapon or skill. It keeps the forward momentum going at a nice pace. My friend Joe, who is a designer at Paragon on ‘City of Heroes,’ mentioned getting sucked into the “Just one more level, I want to see what’s added in this one” mode, which is exactly what we were shooting for! How many levels do we have? A full 24! 7 tile-sets, 6 monsters, 2 traps, one power-up, 4 weapons, and a whole mess of dialogue! There’s still a lot to do for the final game, but I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished so far and how well it holds together.
(Oh, and wait ’til you hear all the new music that Nick’s been working on. It just rocks! (In a Nordic folksy kind of way, of course.))
We’re getting ready for a new demo here, and have been striving to put a lot more polished artwork into the game. I (Mike) wanted to share some of the painted – as opposed to pixel – art that I’ve been creating to help flesh out the game. Here’s the new look for our main menu screen:
Here is a loading screen for going between levels:
To share some process with you, here is some line art for the Game Over screen if you are defeated by Yngvarr or one of his many minions:
…And here’s the final painting done from the line art:
Kristof was asking me how I made such hand-drawn looking effect sprites out of 3D particle effects. I figured that if he’d like to know, others might as well. So here’s what I do:
I start with a particle spray in Max (‘though you can use whatever 3D app you want.) Here I’ve made the particle system render with spheres and set the lighting to be high and centered. I export the entire animation out as separate frames with an alpha channel and bring them into Photoshop to compose this animated GIF:
fight cloud - 3D render
In Photoshop, I come up with an action to turn the sprite closer to the colors that I want. Here I took every frame, adjusted the levels, and multiplied by a yellow-tan color.
fight cloud - processed once
I take that animation and save it off as an animated GIF, mapping down to 4 colors. Here’s the GIF with the very limited palette:
fight cloud - mapped to 3 or 4 colors
Lastly, I re-import that file back into Photoshop and hand-paint the rest. I add a single pixel-outline, I adjust the colors more, and I make it look all nice. The clean-up can be a tad tedious… but it beats animating the entire thing by hand!
fight cloud - cleaned up
This isn’t the final sprite for the game: In this instance I’ll layer other puffs and things on top of it. But it does show my process for getting 3D particles to fit the style of the game.
Hi, all! Kristof and I thought it might be a nice way to kick off the blog with some concept artwork, something you haven’t seen in the game demo yet. Here are some sketches of Svenn in a few various poses, nothing we’ve used anywhere yet, along with the nice full-color portrait for the dialogue screens.
Here is our arch-villain, Yngvarr, along with a bunch of face doodles that I went through before ending up with the final version of him in color in the upper left.
Anyhow, hope you like. Thanks for dropping by to see what we’re up to!
