Continuation on drawing a Demon enemy
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Time for our game project is running short as we only have three weeks left to implement remaining graphics and polish the gameplay. We have realized that we were very ambitious with our game from the start. This caused a lot of stress in the start of the project, it even rendered me unable to produce much for some periods. This week, however, I’ve had immensely more creative energy. It has resulted in clearly increased productivity. I am seriously hyped. This weeks highest priority has been creating the digital version of the melee-type demon enemy. This week I got my first digital sketch of the demon done. It finally got the wheels rolling for concretely producing the sprite. Before, I felt like I was stuck on making infinite iterations of the demon on paper.
Most of the time so far I have spent on making the linework. I made the lines quite thick since the character will be reduced in size on screen in the game. This will make all fine detail and lines thinner and harder to notice. I stuck to very basic muscular forms for the body, which adds to the “bulky melee character”-aesthetic. However the basic forms did not look very demonic or evil. This is why I added some spikes to emphasize on it. In the start of the design process I recall thinking about adding a bulky waist armour for the demon, but this had been long forgotten until today when my group member brought up the idea of a loin cloth. The waist armour was also a great chance to add some more demonic and evil forms, which in this case was spikes once again. I still plan on adding some detail for example on the weapon and waist armor, but I’ll save that for after I’ve implemented an initial sprite in the game. It’s important to see how it affects the aesthetic of the game and how it fits its functional purposes. Since the character will be animated, all the body parts have to be animation friendly. In practice this means that when a body part moves and reveals more area, it has to have appropriate graphics under it. This layered way of drawing the body is very new to me, consequently increasing time spent drawing. For the base colours I chose somewhat a classic hellish look; bloody red for the skin and bony yellow for the spikes. As for the armour and the axe I wanted something colder and desaturated to contradict the warmth of the skin. The purple colour is still quite warm but I’m planning to make it colder with shadowing and also add a gradient colour shift from a dark blueish-purple to a bright red towards the edge of the axe. Im very happy about the progress I’ve made so far and just generally hyped about the upcoming colouring, shadowing, detailing and rendering. But I have to keep in mind the Japanese woodblock style art, which tends to keep the shadowing very flat. That’s all for this weeks post. Thank you for reading and have a good one!
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