Following the designs I created during the John Hansard Gallery event we held last week, I’ve started creating concept art/sprite work for the enemies of my game. I feel that these have come out quite nicely, and fit the environment that I have created for my game. I currently have just the 1 sprite for each enemy, though, and will most likely keep it this way as I want to try and have a go at programming the enemies behaviour before I start working on extra sprites for the enemies animations.
I’ve also started designing and creating sprite work for what could potentially be the boss of Windfell Forest. I have noted that due to my lack of coding experience, I doubt my abilities to create a boss fight in the next month, but I figured it’d be worth my time creating a potential boss design, anyways. I’m quite proud of how it’s turned out, and if the sketches I’ve made are anything to go by, the fight could prove fun in a creative sense, too.
Having said all this, I’ve still been struggling for ideas for the player character. I had created a moodboard for inspiration, and created sketches based off of these, but nothing is really striking me at the moment. That’s when I remembered a character I created a few years ago for a personal project. Known as “Dalila”, she is of a similar background to the character I had planned for this project, and she is also able to wield water spirits to fight, similar to how the player will be traversing this world with the Water Guardian. The original images I have won’t work directly as sprites, so there’s still work to be done there, but I believe this could be the next step to having a compelling character to play as.
Translating Dalila’s design to one that could be easily readable during gameplay was a challenge, but I think I achieved a decent design. The most notable change is her water dress is now just a simple cloak, to make animating the character easier. Animation isn’t one of my strongest skills, despite my artistic background, so the making of the run animation was quite a challenge, but I did some research to find what an ideal run animation looks like, and animated from there. There’s still work to be done, but given the time I have left, this animation can work for now.
However, upon importing my player sprite into Unity, there was a glaring issue. The player character doesn’t feel to scale with the game environment, specifically she feels too small. This wasn’t my original intention, and has definitely created more trouble in production, however, I have another design for a player that I think will fit the overall environment better, and so I intend to finish that next week and complete this phase of production.
I had also created these 2 posters based off of one of the designs I picked from the thumbnails I made for my posters. The idea was behind this image was of the player emerging from the dead world inside, indicated by the greyscale of the cave, to the healed world outside, indicated by everything being in colour. However, due to the issue with the character in Unity, I will have to create a new design which reflects the new character I’ll have to design.
