Pixelizing My Sketch

Sketching the animation, took a couple of days, and I liked the way it turned out. I now need to add color as well as make the sketches have the pixel look to it. I initially thought that sketching then importing/tracing would be easier but it turned out to be much more annoying. Since I sketched on a larger canvas, I had to rescale/reposition all the individual frames when I brought them to the main file. This wasn't really challenging but rather just tedious work. However, once I finished the tracing I feel that the pixel animation turned out rather well.

Preparing for Attack

We are now beginning the second sprint. I had finished the walk animation in 4 directions for the Pikeman. Now I am going to start on creating the attack animation for the enemy.  My idea for the Pikeman is to do a lunging-thrust type of attack.  I want to make the attack start from standing still as well.
I figured that I would start with just sketching the animation and then importing to my main character PSD file so that I can trace. Since I used brushes instead of pencil to draw the sketch, I figured I would make the sketch canvas larger than the main 64x64 size.

 From the quick gif I made, this looked like a good animation to aim for.

Walking

We're wrapping up the first sprint this week. I worked on getting a walk animation for the pikeman.  At first this looked to be one of the most difficult tasks to achieve; however, after looking online for walking cycles, I found a good sprite sheet of a walk cycle and I essentially traced the frames.

I found this to be so much easier to finish than trying to draw the cycle from just from my mind. However, although tracing was relatively easy, adding detail, like previose works was tedious.

Starting Pixels

The new week brought some interesting work along with it.  The previous concepts were mainly using smoother brushes and not pixel based.  I tried to to get into the pixel style now.  I based the concepts off of drawings given to me. The first one is a light-armor soldier, while the second one is a heavier armor concept. I will admit that it was difficult to get the top-down perspective at first. Trying to add detail when working with such a small amount of space was the most challenging thing to achieve.  After a few attempts, I think I managed to get the perspective down.

Getting Into Character Concepts

This week, I talked with fellow artist teammates and suggested that we could possibly make some character/enemy concepts. The game takes place in the Aztec era. The main enemy are the Spanish conquistadors. I went for a more cartoony look for the character. I also tried to get the character clothing to match that of the armor set so commonly associated with conquistadors of the time.  I did learn that I should have made it on a smaller canvas.  I originally made this on a very large canvas then scaled it down. I noticed that the quality changed a bit, perhaps for the worse.

A New Beginning

Well winter break is over and the new semester has kicked in.  Unfortunately, Formation Gaming is no more.

Now the remaining members joined West State Studios. We're not starting slowly. The new game is Fifth Sun: a pixel style hack-and-slash game. For the first week, I decided that I would make a draft of a possible map. I based this map of old images of Tenochtitlan.

Week 15: Finishing Touches

We are in the final stretch of the semester. We worked on finishing up the presentation slide. The majority of the time I worked along with the CFO to finish up the final expense sheets. I learned a lot will working on the financial team.  I learned that beginning the company and starting the project will take a lot of money.  I also learned from reading other indie game companies, that they tend to just save up the money to found their projects. I think we would have to do that.

Spread Sheet of Final Expenses

I also worked on editing the final power point presentation that we would be using for our pitch. I mainly worked on formatting of the slides as well as looking over and checking for any grammatical/spelling errors.

Pitch PowerPoint