Now I suspect many of you can guess, let me tell you. Here is the main character from the game. I had already started so I was in for the long haul. Maybe there are bit graphic tools out there that automate this process, but not Pyxel Edit. While end results can be very rewarding, the process of manually dithering sprites is about as far from "fast" as you can get.
Again, for anyone not familiar with CGA graphics, using large(ish) sprite or image sizes and getting creative with dithering, you can actually get a pretty wide variety of shades and tones out of just 4 colors. This is particularly true for the main player and to account for the skewer. The majority of our sprite sizes were 80x80px in terms of art, though characters were in a 160x160 bounding box to account for alignment and animation frames that extend beyond the 80x80px frame. After a GIS session and talking about my own history with games in this palette, I ignorantly stated "Given that we realistically only have about 40 hours for the Jam, restricting myself to 4 colors should to allow me to churn out the art more quickly". For anyone reading this that doesn't know, there are a few CGA color variations that all use only 4 highly contrasting colors, but the most recognizable is the White, Black, Magenta, and Cyan variation. Now, even though I'm 10 years older than most of the rest of the team, I was still quite surprised to find that most of them had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. We accepted that we weren't going to realistically be able to start until 5 or 6 PM on Friday so we were already behind the curve. So after getting the theme, I announced to the team that I wanted to restrict myself to the CGA palette for the jam. So with all of us being in the US and have careers, starting the jam at 1:00 PM was just not going to work for most of us. I especially like its animation component. If you havent heard of it, you really should go check them out. Just as an FYI, for bit graphics today, my preference is Pyxel Edit.
Pyxel edit dither software#
Needless to say, I came up through the ranks of the ever changing landscape of computer capabilities and the art software available. Discovering Paintshop and Photoshop in the years to come changed my world, not counting 3dStudio Max, Maya, and Blender even later. My first experience (aside from Logo), was on the 'Apple II e' using software I cant recall, and really getting the hang of it with NeoChrome on an 'Atari ST'. I've been dabbling in digital art ever since elementary school in the 80's.
Here is a little bit of content around the decision, and execution of our artistic approach.Ī bit of history about myself real quick to set the story. But given the recent reduced cadence of the LDJams, we decided to fill our our schedule with our first Game Makers Tool Kit jam. We have been doing Jams for a number of years now and have been involved in LudumDare and Global Game Jam events almost exclusively. I wanted to make this post based on some feedback we have had on our game, as well as to my own revelation when presenting the idea to the team, to give a little information about the art style used in our GMTK 2019 submission "Ka-bob" You can try it out by clicking on the image below, or at this link. So I am the artist of a somewhat long formed team called BitDecayGames based out of Denver.
0 kommentar(er)
