Sir Sapo hasn't had much of a chance to work on stuff this week, so I'd figure I could talk about some random art problems and ideas I'm dealing with.


In-Game
Note: Sir Sapo and I tend to call anything that's not a piece of art for a menu "in-game," meaning it's used during gameplay.

Alright, so I've been working on designs for the in-game sprites on what I guess we're calling Axis Shift: for reals this time, which is a bit challenging for me.

The main difficulty is that we're working with 64 by 64 pixel tiles for the ships to sit on(with a total screen resolution of 800 by 600, IIRC), which gives us our upper limit for the in-game sprites. This is the size I'm used to working with (I've done a lot of airplanes in that size), but it's a hard to get a space battleship to look, well, badass in 64*64.

It's been a learning process, and I've been experimenting with different styles and techniques. One of the biggest problems has been getting something to look right without a black outline. It's space, so black outlines look like... nothing- and dark other-colors, the logical alternatives, don't look like much on a black background. The tend to look like they're blending into the background too much. So, I tried using light grey outlines, so that the outlines would still be visible, but then that got annoying when I shaded the sprites, because the dark side looked wierd- that is, since the outline had to be darker, it looked like the dark side looks smaller than the light side, ala:




The top one is actual size, the bottom one 2X so you can, like, see it.
[Note: Damn browsers making scaled things fuzzy- what is this, the future?]

Keep in mind that tiny thing above is a battleship- the biggest unit in the game along with carriers, so all the other ships are going to be smaller than that.

Yah, so I've been practicing, and getting some better results:




Here we have a battleship, a cruiser, and a destroyer. The Destroyer is barely more than 20 pixels long, so those pixels in the outline really start to count.

For my third attempt, I started without an outline, just a shape, and then added internal detail, which seemed to work better. I think it's mostly psychological- it really shouldn't matter- but I think it looks the most recognizable as a space ship:





Eh, needs a little more monkeying with, but I think it's getting better, especially at native res... opinions?


Menu sprites
Since space ships, like a lot of things, can't be really identified really easily at really tiny resolutions, I decided to try and come up with ideas that will connect the sprites you move around to the idea of massive fleets duking it out in the depths of space. I also didn't want to spend hours implementing something.

I came up with a possible solution: make big sprites for the menus (like the purchase screen) but make them less detailed or unfinished than I would usually. I could've just made giant sprites and not colored them (just had detail lines), but I kind of like the idea of having just the silhouette.

As an example, I made a destroyer silhouette in the size I wanted compared to the original in-game sprite(4X larger):




I'm really pissed off at firefox for trying to anti-aliased a scaled image, but I hope you get the idea. I think might even go back and detail them after creating the profile, but I like having just the silhouette, because it leaves it up to the imagination what's actually there- and your imagination probably thinks of something cooler than what I would actually draw.

Anyway, I made a couple more for the Battleship and Cruiser classes, and I like how it looks, especially the size comparison between different classes:




Anyways... I better be going to bed. Oh well.

- Goodnight!