Development blog 2: enemy design
|
Good morning all. As one of the artist in group Zombie. I am excited to present you our second development blog- the enemy design. I will continue this blog from the previous one and talk about the enemies that will appear in our Exploration game- Umibozu. This time we will talk about how the arts were designed based on our newly determined perspective. In our case, Umibozu was an exploration game, we wanted to reward people when they discover something. People will not have fun if they discovered a triangle enemy or a square ruins. Because of that, we decided to lift up the camera angle 45 percent degree above the horizon and made our game a Zelda like an isometric top-down game. The reason for doing so was explained in the previous development blog. By doing that, we could draw our art assets that look 3d even though all game projects actually act in a top-down objects manner mechanically.
(The black shark above was the original enemy design in our game. As you can see, it doesn’t look interesting because living creatures usually do not look good when they are looked from above.) After we have decided the perspective of our game, another problem emerged. It was really hard to move around the playable character in the so-called isometric Zelda like top-down perspective. Because it is not realistic to move around a single boat sprite that looks 3d, we made the boat to be able to move towards 8 directions and 8 different sprites were assigned for each of the direction to solve the problem.
The up-coming image depicts the new perspective for enemies in Umibozu. When I was designing the enemies, I faced the same issue. The enemies also needed to move in 8 directions and have 8 sprites for each one of them. Instead of making 8 different sprites, we decided to make only 2 sprites for each one of the enemies. One for when the character is moving left and one for when the character is moving right. By doing so I didn’t need to make 8 sprites for each enemy. (In this case, the octopus is moving to the right. When moving to the left, this image will be flipped. Moving top or down does not flip this image).
Thank you for following the development of Umibozu. I will update my blog and talk about scrum next week.
 |
