Spriting

It’s been a busy week here at Sprixelsoft, developing the graphical style for Super Hematoma. Half of the work is figuring out the look of the graphics; after working out some general concepts for character designs I sat down this week and attempted to refine it into something that matches our retro vision.  But the other half of that work is, of course, deciding on some sort of a workflow to generate those precious works of art.

One thing that Matt and I have known for a while is that we love the old pixel art of games from the late 80’s and early 90’s, but even with that in mind it’s been a bit of a tricky thing deciding just how limited we want to be with everything. The idea was appealing to try and be anal retentive and generate something that could have been played authentically on a NES, or a Sega Genesis, but then there’s the reality that we just want to make a fun game and not burden ourselves with strict graphic and sound and programming conventions that could potentially make our lives a lot harder and cause us to miss out on some newer techniques that we could be taking advantage of.

The jury is still out on what the exact screen resolution is going to be that we end up using, but we’re leaning heavily toward a classic full screen ratio. And it’s a decision that will need to be made soon as those tiny precious pixels make a huge difference on what the Bruisers, items, and effects all can look like!

One thing that, I briefly mentioned in the last Progress Report was that we have ambitions of allowing people to customize their Bruisers… swapping hair, eyes, costumes… it’s all very grandiose in our heads, but unfortunately the scope that we are able to tackle as just two people may have to be significantly less than I dream of. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been playing around with options! After working out a couple of fighting poses that we were happy with, we decided that realistically it’s probably going to be too much work to have heaps of different fighting styles in our Bruisers. We’re going to go with a male and a female for now, but hopefully some day we’ll be able to revisit it and add in multiple fighting poses per gender. In the meantime we’re going to begin with just a single costume per gender, and try to work in some extra costumes as we develop. This still leaves us with some room for character customization as we hope to get a few different eye and hair styles for the player to choose between, as well as adjusting skin and hair colour. We think that this should allow for enough variation that it’ll be easy to tell which Bruiser is which during combat, as well as offering some player choice.

Of course, the fun part after working on some designs is trying to translate that into game art! I made a few attempts at these translations over the week, and surprisingly a lot of that time went into testing software. There’s a few different applications out there for creating pixel art, and while I own a copy of Photoshop, that’s not necessarily the best one for animating at the individual pixel level. I’ve had some difficulty resolving anti-aliasing issues in photoshop when cutting and pasting pixels, and I’m not sure of a good way to lay out sprite sheets either short of setting up some sort of elaborate action… I’d rather use a tool that was specifically designed for it. I looked a bit at GraphicsGale, and Pro Motion which both seem like very full featured software, but I didn’t find them quite as intuitive to get into as I did ASEPRITE. Am I swayed slightly by the fact that it’s called Allegro Sprite Editor? Maybe, but I find (at this early stage) that it’s easy to use, I like that it’s actively being worked on, and I like that it seems to be the most compatible with various operating systems. I always like to be future proof by finding tools that will work on multiple platforms.

So that leaves us with the software figured out (hopefully), however as I said earlier, I’m still working on an image resolution for our game. We know we want if full screen… but do we want it to be authentically retro tiny? Maybe we want a larger resolution than was used on the old consoles so that we can get some higher fidelity out of the character design? I personally like the look of the smaller characters, but I think we’re going to find it much more limiting with creating options for the swappable hair and especially the eyes. As you can see in that Featured Image at the top, there’s a bit of a difference in what the faces are able to look like once you start cutting down the amount of pixels.

Here are some of the in-progress Bruiser sprites I’ve been working on!