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#Minish Cap art was used for reference and color
sherlocktheravencat · 3 years
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GOD it's so nice when your homework becomes fun again...
This is for my Advanced Photoshop collage course.
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neko-shinigxmi · 4 years
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ALRIGHT, Hit me up with your LoZ theories!!
   OKAY, this is going to be a MAJOR DOOZY, so hear me out-! Buckle in, get snacks, a drink or two, cause whenever LoZ and I lock eyes, I write like a novelist who’s final draft is due Monday of next week…and it’s Friday.
   First off, I’d like to introduce my building block to all of my subsequent theories involving this series: There’s a fourth goddess that would complete the Triforce.
   This theory has…typically died out, but I won’t let it. I keep mine alive and kicking, because while most people try to nudge someone else into that empty slot (Goddess of Time, Goddess of Deserts (of the Gerudo), Hylia, etc), there’s a FAR more convincing, prior unknown option… One of darkness.
   Four themes are actually more prevalent in LoZ despite threes being the sign of the goddesses and- you would think- be more common compared to fours, but… Hey, there’s a lot to work with when you have four, especially when you look at it from the perspective of the Japanese.
   Anyways… Under the cut go the shorthand of my extensive notes.
We’ll start with four, the first basis for this theory I think of a lot: “Four” in Japanese can be read as “shi” [死 ]. This specific reading translates to “death” and is considered an unlucky number. If four goddesses could be unlucky….why not cast out for 3?
Though what’s interesting… I couldn’t find a source for it- so who knows, maybe the guy pulled it outta his ass- but there was a theory video involving Majora’s Mask that mentioned purple often being a color of death in Japan. Again, couldn’t find anything to back that claim up, but…. On the other hand…..
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The image above is of the Shadow Medallion from Ocarina of Time. Not only is it in the color purple, but it’s found in the Shadow Temple (a place that seems to reek of death and horrors) and features…an upside down triangle, with three dots around it…… Hmm.
Equally baffling, the Four Poe Sisters from the Forest Temple in the same game. Four over three, again. Also, this is a trend we see repeat in ANY Four Sword adventure… Take a look.
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Note how we can see the colors of the four goddesses represented here. Red for Din, of Power. Green for Farore, of Courage. Blue for Nayru, of Wisdom…and purple. The fourth, odd color out.
This is actually ANOTHER issue in Tri-Force Heroes. While on the surface, all Links would be accounted for…. There IS a fourth, forgotten Dopple…. Check it out.
Ditto for Minish Cap; four objects, purple the odd color out. Image link.
It’s suspicious, I tell you.
Four AGAIN shows up in Twilight Princess, wherein there are FOUR guardian Light spirits… Three helped the goddesses, while one was unaccounted for…. I believe this was Ordona, far removed in nearby Ordon Village.
Nintendo tries to state “Ordona” finishes Faron’s name (for Farore), but I personally find THAT a load of bologna.
Though not of four, Purple continues to be an important color in the LoZ franchise… Even when they remove it from the final product. See here, the removed Fairy Doors from Phantom Hourglass (Philos) and the almost-there sixth Lokomo of Shadow… See their art Here (Syda).
A theory persists Bryne might’ve still been the reincarnated “Shadow lokomo”, but it’s only a theory that’s never been confirmed. (Much like the stuff I do.)
As well… What purpose would there be for the goddesses to create flaws? Who would create Demise? Where did he come from? The darkness, the evil….and all the creatures that bloom from it…?
Having also learned of beings like the Horned Statue and looking more into Malanya (BotW)… There are beings who don’t fit the norm of most “godly” creations, but STILL fit into the role of such “gods.”
(Which, I should note now, I use loosely; as someone else pointed out during my binge-watching, “gods” are probably used in translation of “kami”… Which is more like “god or spirit” in Japanese. Kami are a complicated thing for our mindset of what gods are, but… Essentially, all things have a spirit and are alive. A worship of them can go from “spirit” to “god” as far as translation goes, but….. Y’know.)
I just personally don’t see a bunch of well-intentioned goddesses go a’slippin’ and spill out some evil, especially one as chaotically evil as Demise goes…
So I brought forth the idea of Orona. An exiled fourth goddess of Shadow. Chosen color purple. Creator of Demise and the evil within the hearts of Hyrule.
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   Oh, and the bit! About the Horned Statue and Malanya! That’s new!!! Which is what’s really gotten me jazzed about my theories involving LoZ… I just keep feeling like Nintendo is unintentionally validating me, even though it’d be a game-changer and probably would work TOO WELL for ending the series… Which is the last thing Nintendo would want to do.
   ….I mean, not that it’s going to stop me any. I can write out how my version of the series could end as Nintendo keeps making money and I keep giving it to them, too, LMAOOO. To be fair to them, don’t fix what ain’t broken….and I’ll sure keep buying Pokemon and Legend of Zelda long as the series keeps living up to the core of what they’ve always been, y’know?
   Anyways, wanna drop one more theory on ya before I set you free. :3c
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So… Remember Groose? Skyward Sword? Red hair, kinda tanned skin, golden eyes? Wanted the girl, lost out to MC, grew enough by that time that he wasn’t bitter about it, and flew off with friends to go be cool somewhere else?
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Yeah, that guy. So…. Here me out.
Groose got cursed by Demise, too. It wasn’t ONLY Zelda/Hylia and Link who were dragged down into the reincarnation cycle.
Hear me out… Most people have made a fair guess that- by endgame- Groose and Co. flew off in the way of Lanayru Desert. (Once a populous ocean and with green fields… I’d joke about it being a downgrade, but I live in a desert, too, so… FML.) This location- deserts, specifically- have been KNOWN for housing the Gerudo race.
Now…. Please look at Groose compared to an OoT Gerudo.
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They might not be the most similar people in existence….but you try to tell ME that a few who-knows-how-many-generations later, his kids could VERY WELL end up becoming the Gerudo race.
(Also not a flattering picture, but I don’t have a lot to work with premade…and I currently don’t have the ability to make one of these on my own.)
So what am I getting at? Groose was cursed to have his descendants bear his new host.
Theory goes like this: Groose is cursed. Never knows of it. He has kids normally… They have kids normally….for a few generations. As time goes on, more women are born, less men. Until no boys are born, only little girls who resemble their mothers. It never ceases.
Until the day the first boy in thousands of years is born. He is hailed a king of their people, in honor of such a rare, undocumented occasion.
Ganondorf, they name him. Unknowing that within the boy, is a demon, waiting for his time. Ganondorf shall grow up with a hatred unmatched, nobody will know why, but the goddesses will. They will do nothing unless called down with might.
Unwittingly, Groose continues a line of a people scorned nearly always by Hyrule, who’s king is ALWAYS destined to lose himself to the madness of the darkness that consumes his very being.
EDIT: BEFORE I FORGET, I also think it’s very telling of BotW to say there’s “not been another male Gerudo since the King who became the Calamity” that’s very HMM, isn’t it?? (Reference: Creating a Champion / Master Works)
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   My name is Aki, and I stan the LoZ franchise because I rebuilt it with my bare hands, how’ya doin’?
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blastoisemonster · 3 years
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The 1000 And One GBA SP Special Editions
I was browsing through my issues of Pokèmon World yesterday and noticed that almost every copy published between the years 2003 and 2004 had at least one new Special Edition GBA SP to show. We're not talking about a few instances, either: Pokèmon World was a monthly subscription, so these special editions were indeed prolific.
When the GBA SP was released in February 2003, it was actually a big deal in the history of portable consoles; it was the first Game Boy to feature a rechargeable battery, implying a great energy and economic improvement, the screen was backlit, so it could be played anywhere without concerning about external light sources, and its folding design contributed to screen preservation (plus, I'm pretty sure the design of the DS was based on the SP). The GBA SP was also the last Nintendo portable console to be actually named Game Boy, as we all know the DS is just called Nintendo DS (seems a bit silly though... I don't find anyhing wrong with the name Game Boy DS). Personally, I owned both the classic GBA and the GBA SP; when the battery case of my classic GBA broke, I decided to switch to SP and never got back: this little jewel has been with me since probably the year 2004, still works perfectly nowadays, and up to this day I still play both GB and GBA titles on it.
The GBA SP was released at the beginning in three standard colours: Silver (AKA Platinum), Black (AKA Onyx/Graphite) and Dark Violet (AKA Cobalt) (the paints used are all opaque, but translucent with a slight “pearly” texture). The rest listed here are all special editions. I'll also try to be cronologically correct, but one can never tell. This could be a nice reference guide for further researches, or as a checklist for whoever is rich enough to collect them all. It'll be also subject to updates from time to time because who knows, maybe Pokèmon World actually missed a few of them in the way. Wikipedia has no complete list of this either, so I guess it's gonna be helpful.
BlastoiseMonster's Guide List For GBA SP Special Editions
- Tribal. Released worldwide as the first special edition of the console, this one is simply a Platinum SP with black, tribal tattoo designs printed on the case. - Pearl Blue. A worldwide special edition release sporting a light, sky blue case. A later edition got released with an even brighter backlit screen. - Pearl Pink. Primarly aimed at the female audience, this special edition is pearly pink. It’s the SP I have! Looking at it in real life, the pink is actually very subtle and leaning more to a silverish tone, which is a good thing. xP A later edition got released with an even brighter backlit screen. - Pearl Green. Special worldwide edition with a subtle, light green tone. A later version got released with an even brighter backlit screen. - Dual Tone Platinum/Onyx. One of the many variants that took advantage of the SP’s foldable design, this one has a black case for the screen and a silver one for the buttons. - Mario VS Donkey Kong. This one got released in bundle with the Mario VS Donkey Kong game: it’s red on the top, silver at the bottom and the upper case has Mario’s “M” logo printed on! - All Blacks. This one is a variant released in New Zealand only! It’s... well, all black, and the front case bears the All Blacks football team logo printed in white. - Classic NES. Aaah, the nostalgia! This cute American and European special edition is painted all over to look like a Nintendo Entertainment System. Its buttons are colored to emulate a NES controller, too! - Famicom (Ver.1). A japanese-only counterpart of Classic Nes edition, painted in white and crimson to emulate the good old Famicom colours, of course. Version 1 is mostly white with the bottom part (battery side) in dark red, with the buttons and screen border of the same colour. - Famicom (Ver.2). An updated version of the japanese Famicom special edition sports a white top and a dark red bottom, painted in gold on the button side to emulate a Fami controller. It war released in honour of the 20th anniversary of the beloved console. - Final Fantasy Tactics. This special edition was bundled with a Final Fantasy game and is of a milky, pearly white colour all over. - Gold. This golden special edition with a brighter screen was exclusively sold in “Toys R Us” stores of both Japan and North America. - China Dragon (iQue). When the GBA SP got released, China had very strict restrictions for game importing, so Nintendo had to release its games throughout the “iQue” brand: this special edition is available only through that brand and in fact bears such a logo on the front instead of the Nintendo one. It’s red coloured on the front, black on the back and sports a very nice black dragon design printed at the top! - Kingdom Hearts Deep Silver. This special variation bundled with a Kingdom Hearts game is silver on the outside cover and dark grey on the inside; it also bears a logo printed at the top and two graphics near the buttons. - Lime Green. Released in North America only, this SP was bundled with Donkey Kong Country (again? how many ports does this game have?) and has a very bright, acid green colour all over. - Naruto. Probably bundled with a Naruto game, this SP is bright orange all over with blue buttons and a white printed logo coming from the anime/manga. - Pokèmon Emerald: Rayquaza. Let’s start with the Pokèmon themed editions! This one is to celebrate the release of Pokèmon Emerald in Japan, and Pokèmon Center stores were the only ones to sell it: it’s emerald green with a silhouette of Rayquaza at the top. - Pokèmon Ruby: Groudon. Of course, Pokèmon Center had to celebrate each third gen Pokèmon release with a new SP! Ruby version is dark red with a close up of Groudon at the top, its eye stands out as it’s printed in yellow. Only 1000 were made! - Pokèmon Sapphire: Kyogre. Pokèmon center exlusive for Pokèmon Sapphire, it’s dark blue with a close up of Kyogre at the top, its eye stands out as it’s printed in yellow. Only 1000 were made! - Pokèmon Fire Red: Charizard. Luckily, some Pokèmon themed special editions got released worldwide, too, like this one for Pokèmon Fire Red: it’s in bright, light red (almost orange) with a white lineart of Charizard on the front and inside. - Pokèmon Leaf Green: Venusaur. Of course, even Leaf Green got it special edition. It’s in bright green (leading towards teal on the inside) with a white lineart of Venusaur on the front and inside. - Pikachu. This very fun worldwide special edition is completely in matte yellow plastic and has Pikachu’s muzzle printed on the top! The buttons are brown and a dark yellow silhouette of the electric mouse can be seen on the inside. - Torchic. Orange is Japan’s national colour, and to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Pokèmon Center, the japanese store chain released a bright, pearly orange SP with the silhouette of Torchic on the top. It’s hard to see in pictures, but the graphic is etched on the case rather than printed. - Rip Curl. A silvery white American and Japanese variant printed all over with the Rip Curl logo, both on the top and in the inside. - Rockman EXE. A japanese exclusive bundled with a Rockman (or, as we call it, Megaman!) game: it’s in bright electrric blue with sky blue buttons and yellow rubber protections above the screen. - Gundam G Generation. Another japanese exclusive, bundled with a Gundam game in bright red with a yellow logo printed on the top. - Swiss Gamer. A Switzerland exclusive! It’s crimson red with a white cross on the top, making it look like Switzerland’s national flag! - Sword Of Mana. This japanese exclusive bundled with the Sword Of Mana game is of a pearly, aqua blue shade. - Who Are YOU? This street art special variant got released in North America: it’s black all over and has a white logo on the front. - Zelda Edition. Probably one of the most famous and beautiful special editions after the Pokèmon ones, this worldwide-released SP is obviously made to celebrate the Legend Of Zelda franchise, bundled with the Minish Cap game; it’s gold painted (a far richer golden hue than the Toys R Us version, I must say!) and has a triforce logo printed at the top. 30 of these units were autographed by Shigeru Miyamoto and given away randomly as a secret prize for the lucky ones who decided to preorder the game! - Samus Satin. The players in Europe, North America or Japan who wanted a special refurbish for their SP could send their own units to the Nintendo headquarters to get it back with this variation; basically, Club Nintendo subscribers could pay 600 points and have their console completely renewed in bright red at the top and orange at the bottom, just like Samus’ space armor.
There’s 34 editions in total, which is indeed an impressive amount! And seeing them all together is quite a show!
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symbianosgames · 7 years
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Despite being a fairly mediocre artist, I get a lot of comments and compliments on the artwork and visual design in Ikenfell. This makes me very happy, of course. Obviously, those who dislike it are much less likely to say so to me personally, but I love that lots of people are very receptive to the look and style of the game. I’ve been asked several times to talk about my approach to the pixel art, and what kinds of rules, palettes, and inspirations I use for the game. So this will be a large, orderless, and rambling post about all of that!
About Ikenfell
Perspective
Inspiration
Colours
Process
Characters
Portraits & Dialogue
Battles
Ikenfell is a heartwarming turn-based RPG about a school of magic and its troublesome students. It is currently in active development, and we're aiming for a 2018 release on Steam and the Humble Store. Humble Bundle Inc. is publishing the game.
Official Website / Official Press Kit
If you write about the game in a blog or article, please use assets from the official press kit!
A note about "good" pixel art
As with most art styles, there is a lot of contention about what good pixel art is and what best practices should be. I follow some general guidelines, but most of what I do is from just repeatedly doing lots of pixel art and tweaking my style until I get the results I desire. A lot of amazing pixel artists produce work that is far beyond my capabilities, but I do the best I can within my limits.
This overview is not about how to make good or popular pixel art, it is about my design decisions regarding my own game, my inspiration, and my reasoning behind them.
Now, let’s begin!
Ikenfell’s camera, like a lot of 2D games (especially RPGs), has a birds-eye view of the game world.
The camera is looking down at the world, if you imagined it in 3D, at about ~60 degrees (this is a rough estimate, in this screenshot alone you can see I am very liberal with the actual angle of objects). The projection is orthographic, meaning that as objects get further away from the camera, they do not actually look smaller (as in real life), they are “flattened” onto the screen.
Often game developers will just make 2D games and take all this for granted, and just draw the art, but I like to think about camera and perspective a lot, as it’s one of the key relationships in the game between the player and the world itself. Knowing the details of this relationship can make the difference sometime when you’re making a visual design decision, as even technical details can help you highlight where and when it’s most important to break these rules.
Ikenfell’s visual design is inspired by several games. I found a screenshot from each game that was relatively similar to the Ikenfell screenshot I posted above, so you can easily see where I drew ideas from each!
Link's Awakening
I love Link's Awakening’s extremely reserved use of tiles, and efficiency with space. Every room has an interesting shape, the background tiles use a very minimal amount of antialiasing to occasionally introduce interesting shapes and curves, and rooms are often reduced to their very basic ideas. But you don’t want multiple rooms to feel the exact same, and Link’s Awakening does this wonderfully. Here’s a simple 4-screen graveyard in the game:
This simple area is wonderful. You get an off-purple colour and haunted trees to give you a sense of unease (ghosts will pop out of graves and attack you, but the visuals make you ready for it). The little rubble tiles and weedy overgrowth convey that this is an old, run-down graveyard, not well-kept. The cliff in the bottom screens gives you a sense of location (the graveyard is on a raised-up plateau, giving some sense of the burial rites of whoever owned these graves). The exits to the left and top have different terrain types, indicating that this graveyard is a bridge from one area to another, so we know we’re leaving our previous location. And, finally, despite the 4-rooms containing all the same elements, they are each differently shaped and detailed. You have multiple paths to walk through each room, so there is no correct path, just a strange haunting area to navigate through (while avoiding mean ghosts).
I could talk this much about every single screen in Link’s Awakening, so I’ll stop now, but this kind of overthinking is what drives a lot of Ikenfell’s inspiration. What a gorgeous game.
Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire
While I am not particularly fond of the character designs (or the pixel art in general) of Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire, I do like their buildings and interiors a lot, so they served as inspiration for a lot of Ikenfell’s architecture.
I like how, to create the least amount of view-obstructing details, these games often just eliminate the side and bottom walls of interiors. In this screenshot, there’s some subtle shadows on the side to give a sense of the ceiling’s height, and the bare minimum amount of details scattered about to give a sense of this character’s lifestyle:
Interiors were often cramped, but so many buildings in this game have completely unique artwork, which was very inspiring. When a building or a house looked completely different from others, I was always inspired to search it, and it was always pleasing to explore its interior with its wonderful new details. This bike shop, with its tiled floor, yellow/orange highlights, thin interior walls, and details scattered about was such a cool looking little area:
This game inspired me to research dozens and dozens of building styles and designs, and always to try to make new houses, buildings, and interiors look and feel distinct.
Mother 3
The simple lines, bold flat blocks of color, and almost childish flat look of Mother 3 wonderfully disguises its immense cleverness and wonderful use of space. I thought this game was a huge step-up visually from Earthbound, and if, after playing, you go back and just look at a few rooms, you start to see how nicely arranged a lot of them truly are.
Just like in the above screenshot, this screenshot below shows another night-time scene. Rather than use a real lighting system (difficult on a small system like the GBA), the game uses beautiful blue/purple palettes for dark areas.
The game just has this wonderful way of breaking up monotony as well. In the next screenshot, it’s a simple room with a stairway leading up to a door. But the building is run-down, so they create little 3D indents in the walls, break off pieces of the siding, carpet the stairs, stain the walls, and just create a series of interesting edges that turn a room that would look very boring into a very visually appealing place to walk through. All you have to do here is hold right, but somehow it feels like so much more, this place has a history and you can feel it down to its very skeleton.
The dark outlines around characters and objects in Ikenfell is very inspired by Mother 3, as well as the bold colours and inner-edge lighting. If you look at this side-by-side comparison (Mother 3 on the left, Ikenfell on the right), you can see how solid objects have dark outlines at their edges, but edges inside the sprite use a highlight colour instead, rather than another dark line cutting across them.
I really like how minimal this is, makes objects seem whole, and gives a strong sense of shape and body to things without cluttering them up with detail. If all the edges of an object use dark line, even in their interior, they tend to look really messy and ugly when done at such a low resolution.
Minish Cap
This game is so utterly gorgeous, I wish I could do it any justice by saying I’m very inspired by its visuals, but I can’t really. I often look at dungeons, buildings, forests, and mountains of this game when creating artwork for Ikenfell, but rarely can I even come close to making it look even remotely as good.
When colouring, I like to look at this game, because it does a wonderful job of ramps. The way these trees darken closer to their base is just beautiful, and the little way so much detail is suggested rather than shown is expertly done. Notice how the grass is mostly flat, but there are just a few tufts here and there?
Minish Cap, like Mother 3, also makes tremendous use of huge bodies of flat colour. Detail is often suggested with little bits, like the clouds in the screenshot above. It also serves a helpful gameplay purpose: very often, flat coloured areas are places you can walk, and highly textured objects and tiles are solid. I take great inspiration from this when pixelling Ikenfell's scenery.
Ikenfell actually does the inverse of this. Often, floors and the ground are textured, but objects like furniture and walls are flat, so they look like big obstructing blocks of colour, and you know you cannot pass them. If we highlight all the large flat blocks of colour in this room, we can see a very clear shape, making the room very easy to read, despite being cluttered with a lot of details and characters.
So while I take a lot of inspiration from the games above, and it is very clear how they inspired me, I quite often will deviate from their rules where I feel it works best for my game. By doing so, I have a huge amount of other screenshots and locations from those games I can look at for reference, but I’ve managed to give the game its own unique look and feel, despite having very strong influences.
I find colouring very difficult, and it often takes me a ton of experimentation to end up with something I’m happy with. In Ikenfell, lots of the areas will still probably be changed and re-coloured a lot before the game is done, but I still have a few patterns I find myself repeating.
Most areas of Ikenfell can be divided into two colour groups: a base and a highlight. There is usually one or two base colors, and one or two highlights. Here are a few screenshots and their respective main colour pairings:
Here’s an image that shows my general process when creating environment tiles for a new area. I usually pixel a room, and then break it up into tiles after I know what I want it to look like. Then I can use those tiles to piece together new rooms.
Here is an animated version of that same image, so you can see how each step improves the look:
This example environment doesn’t really have much colour. Sometimes I colour it right away, other times I’ll just work with values (like the above example) and then colour it after. It depends how I’m feeling, and how complex the tiles are.
Since the entire game occurs in a single place, the titular school of magic itself, it’s quite a contained story. This makes character design really fun, because I don’t have sprawling cities or huge towns to worry about. There are probably only about 30–40 characters in Ikenfell, and each has a unique design. There is no character template I use, I pixel each one from scratch, and usually have a couple others next to it for reference so I can make sure it fits in the game.
Here you can see twelve of the game’s characters and their respective silhouettes. The legs are the only thing that they really all have in common, and looks kinda templated. If I was able to start the game from scratch again, I think I would like to play around with size more (make kids shorter, have fatter characters be fatter, and taller characters be taller, muscular/etc.) With so few characters, though, they’re all very identifiable, so I’m pretty happy with them like this.
Not much else to say here. You’ll notice that most characters also follow a two/three-colour scheme. The choice to leave out eyes was because their sprites are too small: eyes ended up just looking the same on all characters (which I didn’t like), or they were comically large. Since the game has portraits during conversations, I felt like it was more important to emphasize their faces and expressions there.
Speaking of which…
For a good several months of development, Ikenfell actually didn’t have portraits for dialogue. The sprites would just move around and have conversations, and that was it. I didn’t have confidence to draw large character portraits (I am terrible at drawing humans and anatomy), and I already felt like the game was becoming too large for me to handle.
But, on a whim one day, I drew little portraits for each of the main characters in my notepad, with a pencil. I loved how these little drawings looked, so I drew them again with a few expressions, and I couldn’t unsee them. I decided that it’d be a lot easier to pixel them if I drew them in pencil first, then translated that to pixel art, which is how I’ve done most of the character portraits now.
Here are a few and their respective silhouettes. Notice that every single character is asymmetrical. I learned early on that if a character’s left/right side is a mirror-image, they look really creepy and strange. This is probably normal art school stuff, but I learned it the hard way.
I’m very happy I did this. I think the characters come alive so much more when you see them talking and expressing themselves like this, and now I can’t even imagine the game without it.
Here you can see how they look in action. The portrait and the textbox slide in, but there is no text immediately. Your eye goes to their face, so you first see their expression. Then the text prints out, and your eye naturally moves to follow it. I pushed the face down into the textbox, instead of on top of it, to reduce how much screen space the dialogue took up as much as possible.
Characters can only speak in short sentences this way, longer sentences being broken into multiple chunks, but this allows me to shift between micro-expressions while they talk. Here you can see Maritte’s anger transition into more of a general frustration, which is a lot easier to notice than if it only had the text.
When I originally was working on the game, it was actually an action RPG, more like Link’s Awakening. It was quite a few months into development before I had some issues with this, and transitioned the game into a turn-based tactical RPG instead.
The reason for this was that I didn’t like how, because the gameplay took place in the school itself, all the rooms had to be designed for fighting and maximum movement. Interesting room shapes and cramped spaces suddenly weren’t viable when I wanted them to be, because real-time fighting wasn’t very fun or interesting in those kinds of rooms.
So I moved battles into a completely separate screen, which allows me to design them however I want, while also designing the overworld to be whatever shape I want as well. The battles are much different than the overworld. Suddenly the graphics are huge and details, and the characters are much more animated and alive!
These battles are 12 x 3 tiles, so they are much more horizontal than vertical. Because of this, characters can also only face left and right. This means I can flip animations, greatly reducing my workload. You’ll also notice that the battlefield is skewed as well, but why?
If we remove the skew, it becomes readily apparent:
Without the skew, we have a problem with occlusion: characters on a tile immediately above another character are almost completely covered if the sprite is large. As soon as we skew the battlefield, though…
We no longer have this problem, since characters can only ever be vertically aligned if they are two tiles apart, and most sprites aren’t tall enough for that to be an issue. I also think it simply makes battles look more dynamic and exciting anyway.
I hope you enjoyed reading this! There’s a lot more to talk about, but this is a simple overview to explain a lot of my graphical choices while designing the game. I might do some smaller posts talking a bit more about the technical details of how I approach the pixel art, but this was a good introduction.
I can’t wait until you can all play this game! I’m having so much fun working on it, I hope you enjoy it when it is released. Please email me if you have questions about anything, my inbox is always open.
@ChevyRay / [email protected]
Artwork by Darcy Dee
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