Overview:
This week we covered shape theory and were tasked to create the assets for our top down shooter prototype: enemies, a player, a background, a projectile and a crosshair.
Inspiration:
I chose to base my game around pokemon because I like pokemon. I wanted to try a bit of animation before we properly learned it so i made my enemy assets and projectiles all able to roll as they moved to make it look like they werent just drifting towards the player. Between this and wanting to keep pokemon’s non threatening vibe, I made both enemies circular to try and implement some of the shape language we learned about in that week’s lecture. For the enemies I chose rowlet and spheal as they are both particularly round, rollable and cute, then for the projectile i went with the pokeball cos it made sense considering the theme.
I tried to make the player into the chibi style of the pokemon character sprites when they were 2D but it didnt translate fantastically to 32×32 as the original sprites tended to be roughly 24×24 and I ended up having the head be massively oversized.
The environment was a pretty standard plains thing with grass, shrubs and rocks so that it wasnt just a flat colour or repetitive grass.
The crosshair is a pretty standard crosshair there isnt really much to say. I changed the background to black so it was easier to see.
Improvements:
I think there are a few improvements I would make like increasing the detail of rowlet as I made it a lot simpler than I made spheal and that created a bit of style dissonance. I would also make the animations more than just 90 degree rotations. I would also try to proportion the player differently as even tho it has pretty much the same proportions and angle as the old sprites it still doesnt look right.
Overall:
Overall I feel it went pretty well, Im happy with most of the art individually even tho some parts dont quite fit with each other and I tried to include some stuff on shape language as well.