Stuff, mostly background-related, very interesting
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I’ll say it right away, as it is: I don’t really (want to) have a clear structure or overarching topic or theme for this week’s post, it is more of a recounting of what happened the week after what happened in last week’s post… After having done the animations of my farmers and other enemies for “Burn Witch Burn” (for more information on that, see last week’s blog post), I went back to the sprite for the player character – Izalith, the fire witch that is being hunted by an angry mob. Being the first sprite I made, she had started to appear different from the others when I revisited her. In the beginning phase of development during sprite conception, I (purposefully) took much more time with Izalith’s sprite, due to her being the protagonist and player character, and thus ended up slightly diverging from my intended style. The result was something just a little bit too clean. I had to go back to the line art, which was not easily done due to my poor organization of sprites and layers inside Photoshop. Using mostly the eraser and the standard brush in an alternating fashion, I tackled the outlines and some of the highlights/details, took out some curves, brought in more edges where I could and a dash of “unfinishedness”, characteristic of pencil sketches. I tried to visually close the gap between her and the rest of the sprite assets, as best I could. Later, I went on to colorize her sprite, which brings me to my background artifacts and the actual background itself, whose creation and coloration made up a big part of that week. I had to produce a two background “panels”, slightly bigger than the resolution our game is aiming for (1920 x 1080), that the game would be scrolling through, constantly looping background panel 1, then background panel 2, back to 1 again, etc. Now I had to come up with a good production method to achieve this. For that, I drew the first background panel, copied it, tripled the vertical size of my canvas in Photoshop, placed one copy of the panel on the very top and one on the very bottom of the canvas. This meant, I had the exact space in between the two to draw the missing second background panel and make sure they properly connect on all ends. After that, I removed the unnecessary duplicate of layer one – et voilà: an infinitely scrolling background. I felt pretty smart after figuring that out.
 These are the little achievements, little moments of joy for old people like me, just starting to work with Photoshop, so please don’t judge! I feel this is a good ending point for the post (mostly to concisely and comprehensively contain the boring stuff in one article) and I will probably go into the coloring of my sprites and artifacts next week. See you then!  |
