Space Shooter Dev. 3 – Pattern
|
I’m starting to think there are more than one Thursday in a week with how often it feels like I’m writing these. Reflection’s good for the soul though, and since I’ve been going on and on about walls for two weeks I think it’s time for another must-have in any household: floors. Exciting, isn’t it. Now this being Fancy Mansion I’m on about, there have to be at least three different kinds of floor to produce three different kinds of sounds. This is so the player may locate the enemy NPC by way of being a really good listener, which is an excellent quality in anyone. And this being Fancy Mansion I’m on about, one of the floor types had to be a really pretty carpet. Most modern rugs in my experience tends towards the monochromatic, but Mr. Otto von Fancy’s tastes lean distinctly old-fashioned. For me to paint something like that up, this meant Googling the words ”old rug” and marveling at the previously unknown (to me) complexity of the patterns. Unfortunately, I’m no master artisan like the people who wove the carpets I looked at and as I started figuring out how I was going to make the tile, I settled for something a lot less complicated. Not to mention all that detail would be lost on an image that’s all of 128×128 pixels big. Im fairly certain Photoshop isnt the ideal software for this sort of task, but lacking other options, we all make do. There was a lot of flipping and copying and turning everything. It wouldn’t do to make an uneven pattern, so I had numerous guides laid out over the image, and every line was really only ever drawn once. After it had been, I’d simply copy it and rearrange it however the pattern demanded to make everything more or less symmetrical. Then I’d slap both bits on the same layer, and duplicate that, increasing the speed of each rearrangement exponentially as the patterns were built up.  |
First off, I put down a rough idea of what i wanted with pen and paper. By now a few pages of my notebook is covered by almost incomprehensible abstractions of tile after tile after tile like some kind of code. After that, it was just a matter of replicating my idea digitally.
