Game development week 1 – Sprites
|
This week I’ve only been trying to get into the whole pixel art thing again since we decided that that would be the style for our game. I have some experience in making pixel art and sprites from way earlier although not much. Before we could really start making any assets we had to decide what size everything was gonna be so we could keep it consistent. After we discussed and planned the various sizes of different assets I could start working on my assets for the week. One of the assets I had to make was the running animation for one variant of our main character avatar you play as in our game. Because every game with a character needs a running animation. You wouldn’t want a character weirdly hovering to its objective in a t-pose. So I set everything up in Photoshop to make it easier to both draw and animate pixel art. I enabled things like grid guidelines and used the timeline function as well for frame animation. I had a lot of trouble starting since I was still a bit rusty but started to get the hang of it more or less and then it started to go somewhat better. The main reason for it being difficult is the fact that the game is supposed to be top down 2.5D and I found it hard to draw a character properly from that view and then animate it nonetheless. But obviously I started with one frame and just tried to work from there. I put different body parts in different layers just to make it a bit easier when moving around stuff like legs and arms. The annoying thing about Photoshop when working with pixel art is that it’s really hard to move around things/transform them properly. You can’t simply rotate something for example because then it gets blurry and not right. This would have been very useful if it worked properly since everything needs to move a lot in different directions quite often when animating something. However it’s still fully managable to work without that kind of function of course. I’m thinking of using another software more focused on pixel art called ”Asesprite” in the future for the drawing part at least. I’ll probably still use Photoshop for animating since that’s still the program I have the most exprience working in for these kind of stuff.
In the end it turned out actually alright. I’m mostly happy with the running animation even though I can still see one or two things that could be fixed but those are just tiny details. This was, after all, my first sprite in a long while.
 |
