But game development has always been at the core of my spriting career. In fact, the only reason I became a spriter was out of necessity to make characters for a game I was making at the time.
It was in the summer of 2000. I was lackadaisically browsing the Net for an RPG engine, since I had no programming experience, and came upon the RPGToolkit. Just a quick glance over the features had me sold on the engine in an instant. But what put the icing on the cake was that it came packaged with a character editor. I opened her up and created my first sprite. A man in a green hoodie, brown pants, black boots, with brown hair. Creating that one sprite made me realize that spriting was much easier than creating a game. So after my game project had failed, I decided that I would be better off joining a team as a spriter than making an entire game on my own.
After a few years of practice, I came across the folks at Audio Dragon, who, after seeing my work, quickly signed me on. After making a few free sprites for the team, I was asked by the site owner to partner up with him to create an MMORPG. After a couple of IMs of brainstorming, we decided upon what will become Winds of Darkness: Online. A game of post-apocalyptic humans in an orbiting city-station that ventures out onto fresh planets to find a new home. That began in May 2003. But unfortunately, with lack of direction, staff departures and firings, and the fact that none of us had ever made a game before, we are still trying to put out a beta. But just this month, myself and 2 others have decided to direct the game ourselves, and we are very close to putting out an alpha. We are currently waiting for me to finish spriting a few monsters.
In the darker days of Audio Dragon, I began to hawk my wares at other sites, trying to put my work in a finished game to help beef up my spriting resume. Luckily for me, spriters are in high demand in the indie circuit. Now I have 2 other jobs. Im the lead spriter for a 2D ORPG project called Mydfall and my first paying job as lead spriter for a 2D Battler RPG called Illusion. I also picked up a spot as Graphics Forum Moderator at OnGameDev and Im putting together a freeware graphics pack and some spriting tutorials for them.
So yeah, Im pretty busy nowadays. But after having spent a couple of years in the game development scene and having spent some time with GameMaker, I feel I now have the experience to make a game on my own. At least, I hope so...
This journal will document my progress on all my spriting jobs, and the progress of my first full game. Which, as fate would have it, is the same game that I tried to build back in 2000.
Wish me luck! :D
