Art Development

With some sort of art style solidified, we needed to start thinking about the necessary components for the game. For one, there needs to be a bunch of NPCs. Most NPCs will be able to be spoken to, and we decided to use talking head shots to show when a character is saying something. NPCs will have head shots, but the player character probably won’t (due to the fact that he/she can be customised and at the minute it seems very daunting).

This guy here is going to be quite an important NPC. He’s been through a lot and doesn’t particularly like anyone anymore. Currently, he doesn’t have a name, but we’re open to suggestions! (Note: we’re not going to call him ‘Dickface’ or ‘Tit-Gypsy’, so don’t try.)

So with sprites and such slightly sorted, we thought it would be a good time to have a go at actual scenes, aka flooring, backgrounds and trees, and maybe move on to more complex stuff.

A simple scene and a slightly less simple scene can be seen below. You need to click on the last one because GIFs look really crap when made small by silly websites.

This should be a lot smaller, but we zoomed it in so you can see the nice details more. It features a squirrel. You’ll be able to kill it.

This screen features a player’s inventory (with two potions), the health and mana bars, dialogue and some cats. Seriously, you need to click on this to zoom in because the guy’s face is so mangled.

Of course, this is all nice and all, but we’ll be making it better. There’s going to be better trees, detailed backgrounds and lots more cats. The cats are crucial to the game. No, seriously.

Initial Sprite Work

Despite being incredibly enthusiastic, our game artist had never actually worked with pixel art. So, before attempting anything serious, she needed to get somewhat acquainted with the art form.

Shown here is a very simple dragon. It probably won’t be used in-game at all, but serves as a useful starting point for the art style. We plan to use quite a simple style of art, possibly with dithering shading (or not, depends how lazy the artist plans on being).

Another few tests were undertaken to get used to working with pixels. Firstly, a simple weapon and then some actual work with the player/NPC sprites. A progression of player sprites is shown below.

Sprites from left to right: initial idea, basic pixel lines, generic player character, finalised base.

Alpha Concept

The earliest concept for the game was very simple: you are a thing and you hit things with other things. You travel through dungeons, attack monsters, use magic and save the world.

Shown below is the very first piece of concept work, as crappy as it may be. The player is the green rectangle, the blue rectangle indicates his weapon movement, the orange squares show a monster and its movement path, the small orange circles are the bones of the room and the big orange circles are background lights.

A lot of action in the game takes place in a series of dungeons. Monsters of increasing ferocity can be found in dungeons, as well as small bosses and secret areas. Some dungeons will be randomised, whilst others are set due to the fact they need to be awesome.

This is our starting point. From here on, we have to make it look good, work perfectly and sound cool.