Project – Week 4
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It’s already been a month since the start of the project, and there’s a lot going on at the moment. I’ve been working on several different things, and it has mostly been making adjustments/editing and getting things together. I’ve spent most of the week editing the sprites that I made and working together with the other artists to pin down the graphical style for the game. We’ve always had an idea of what we wanted the game to look like, but we didn’t gather references or make moodboards together in the beginning of the project, so we just looked up whatever we needed and worked mostly individually. It was definitely time to get together and just get it all down so that everyone works on the same track. This is kind of a short summary of the style that we’re aiming for: – The main inspiration is 1950’s – Pixel graphics with a distinct outline – The color scheme has warm colors in general, but it changes depending on what mode the game is in. – The stealth mode is going to have darker colors, but have to work more on that. … When we had the playtesting session and our Alpha presentation last week we got some comments on the character sprites. There were a few that said that it looked as if the characters were leaning their body back a bit too much while walking, and thought that it was strange or that it seemed like all the characters were walking around extremely confident. It was good that they said it, because I wasn’t completely sure if the tilted perspective that I had tried to achieve worked that well in the game. I didn’t think that it looked that strange, but hearing what others had thought and seen while playing the game made me realize that it was too tilted. So I decided to move the upper body of the characters down to make it a bit closer to real top-down perspective. I think I moved it about two pixels down, or you could say two “pixel steps” in a pixel grid. We’ve had problems with deciding what kind of top-down perspective, “faked” or tilted perspective to go for in this game, but we decided now that it will be easier to try and keep it as top-down as possible.
(A really quick and low quality mockup to see how the different elements would work together. Valdemar’s tiles in the bg are really overdimensioned.) The characters will still be a bit tilted, but the objects/props in the game will be seen from top-down. The objects that had been drawn and implemented in the game for the Alpha were in that perspective, and that means that we won’t have to redraw anything (except for making some other small changes and maybe adding details) which is good. The reason why the characters aren’t drawn as much top-down as the rest of the game is because of the difficulties of showing details from that perspective, which is something that we want to show. But, depending on how the project goes and how it all looks, the characters may be edited again if there’s a need and time for that. Otherwise they’ll look like this:
(I’m going to fix the player sprite’s hands though, and will update this post if possible with the finished version later.) Other things I’ve done is adding 2 extra frames to the enemy walk animation, which was 4 frames while the player had 6 frames, since it’s looks a bit smoother and it’s better to keep the same quality on things. I also began re-working the enemy flashlight sprite and animation, making the light broader and longer, plus adding some light effects on the character. The light/shadow effect was done by using a clipping mask layer (set above the sprite layer), that was set on linear burn with 50% opacity. I filled/used paintbucket on it with a purple color and then erased away the parts that I wanted to be lit up. The procedure was then repeated on every layer for every frame, which was 6 times.
The final result and how the layers looked, the two visible layers are the layers for the second frame. Since I mostly have been working on editing and getting things together this week, I haven’t really made a “new” artefact that I could be talking about. I have some new things that I’m going to work on now that I’ve finished most of the editing work, and I will start with them tomorrow. I’m also working on fixing the deadlines in the backlog, that still hasn’t been approved yet. It would be really bad if our group were to be split up just because of that.  |
