Game Development – 3rd Blog Entry

Hello again, and welcome to my third blog entry in the series where I detail the progress that our team is making in the development of our student project game. If you want more information on the project and earlier work done in it, you can find that in the earlier blog posts.

This week, I will talk about an asset that I created for out game during last week’s production sprint.

Unfortunately, I was sick in a cold for the beginning of the week and the one who was responsible for holding the alpha presentation, so I didn’t complete much work on the actual game.

The asset that I created was an animated sprite for the projectiles used in the game. As the game has a somewhat humorous twist, the projectiles that the both player character and the enemies fire are potatoes. Before I had produced this asset, we used a photo of a real potato as a place holder.

I started out by drawing the general shape of the potato in a Photoshop document that was 320 by 320 pixels in size, and did a basic coloring of the potato using various yellow and brown hues.

I then shrunk the image size to 32 by 32 pixels, the size that the sprite was to appear as in the game.

The reason that I started out in a larger size than the sprite was actually supposed to be was that I found it easier to get a general feeling of the shape when the image was in a higher resolution.

After shrinking down the image to its proper size, I then polished it on a pixel-by-pixel level using the ‘pen’ tool, adding proper shading and refining the outline of the sprite.

This version of the sprite is the one that we used in the live demo part of our alpha presentation last Friday.

One piece of feedback that we got during this event was that the projectiles should have some kind of animation, to give the impression that they are tumbling through the air rather than being shot forward perfectly straight.

As such, I went to work on creating an animation for the projectile. With the sprite already in place, creating the animation with small alterations to it was fairly easy.

With the use of the software GlueIT, I baked the separate sprites in this animation into a sprite sheet. I also implemented this into the game engine with some help from our lead coder.

Although technically not part of last week’s production sprint, earlier this week the graphic artists of our team sat down to make a proper visual style guide together. Style guides are meant to help graphic artists in making the graphics of a game being stylistically coherent. This was something we had not done earlier, to our regret. Due to the decisions made in this style guide, I updated and replaced the projectile animation to have a different outline.