Flamethrower – Week 4
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We are progressing nicely on Desolate Echo, so nicely in fact that the art team are running out of assets to make. So this week was sort of a wrap up for me, dealing with the art that was left and following the playtesting I was also made responsible to retrofit all of our avatar animations on a redesigned version. I will focus this post on the most challenging asset for me to make and that was the flamethrower subweapon. The challenge was that I am not very fond of doing organic or living shapes in pixel art. Due to the limitations of the 32×32 format we are using I had to get creative. I started by charting out various forms of the flame itself using a black outline. The framework for the fireball, here enlarged to 512×512 I went through two different designs before settling on this one. After looking at some reference images on the internet I knew I wanted to include some slight curvatures to the tip of the fireball and so I experimented a bit. Earlier versions hade the curved edges be much wider. With that out of the way I started to fill it with color. Yellows, oranges and reds were used with very little thought put into finer details like shading and such. Making it a simple and functional desing was my priority. I started with only a bit of yellow at the bottom and then it would proceed to orange and turn to red at the top. This design fell apart early, it just didn’t look right. My second attempt was successful however. Using yellow as a streak from top to bottom worked better, and only using the red (which actualy turned into a dark orange) very conservatively at the tip did wonders. The end result looked like this. The final stage of the fireball, scaled up to 512×512 Although nuances in color wasn’t a thing I was going to do, it ended up in the final version anyway, because why the hell not? Now I had a template I could use to complete not only one , but two animations. One where the flame erupts, and one where the fireball is sustained. I went to work in GraphicsGale immediately. The erupt animation was easy to do, simply insert the template into each frame and cut it down in frame one, then cut it a little higher in frame two etc. This produced adequate results and was very time efficent. The sustained fire animation was even simpler. It consists of two frames, the first frame is the template image and the second frame was simply the same image with padding done to it. I am quite pleased considering this sort of animation isn’t my forte. Below are the final spritesheets for both animations.
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