Game Development – 4th Blog Entry

Hello everyone, and welcome again for yet another blog post about the work I’m doing on our team’s school project, Potato Pirates!

One of the artifacts that I worked on last week was the sprite and animation for the enemy plane that is called “Hunter”.

To understand my work process on this design during last week’s production sprint, we must first go back to the very beginning of the project’s production.

One of the very first things I did in the project was to produce a three-page PDF of so-called “thumbnails” of various air plane designs. Thumbnails are simple, quickly-sketched images meant to give a general feel of a character design – generally used as a means to pick out a design to develop further. This was also the purpose of me doing the thumbnails.

After I had done this, I presented them to the rest of our group. We selected a couple of thumbnails to develop into fully realized designs together. These designs were the most urgent ones that was to be implemented into the game in the alpha release – and those were the ones that I worked on at that time. It wasn’t until a while later that the team sat down again to pick out thumbnails to develop for the rest of the enemy plane types.

While some designs had been combinations of sketches, using elements from different thumbnails, the team agreed that the thumb for this enemy type in particular only needed slight adjustments.

Now, let’s jump back to last week’s work!

I started by cleaning up the sketch and refining the line art using Photoshop. While doing this I incorporated some changes that other team members had suggested into the design, such as the rounded back part of the plane and the change from having two rear propellers to one single front propeller. As with the projectile sprite I wrote about last week, I did this in ten times the resolution the finished sprite was to be, as I find that more comfortable when the asset is supposed to be so small in the end.

I then scaled the image down to the appropriate resolution, 120 ×120 pixels. I started colorizing the drawing, picking the colors from the palette in our recently finished graphic style guide. Aside from the colors in their neutral state, his palette also included brighter and darker nuances for shading, and I used those as well.

After being finished with colorizing the plane, I went on to redraw the outline of the plane and some details with the outline brush as dictated by said style guide. I also took a propeller animation that I had done earlier and used it in animating the plane.

After the plane was colorized, in the correct size and with the correct outline and animated, I used the software GlueIT yet again to bake the animation frames into a sprite sheet.