WIP title: House of Orpheus
Project Length: 12 weeks
Programming: Cian Hamer
Art and Writing: Nathalie Kranich
Art Style: Pixel Art
UI: Minimal
Engine: Unity 2D
Other Software: Photoshop, PiskelApp.
Notes on Software:
Unity: We are using Unity for this project because it is the engine we both have most experience with, and we do not want to be slowed down by the learning curve of a new system. Unity suits our purposes fine and is free to use. The system is however not very accommodating towards pixel art, as the camera would have to be very zoomed in towards the small sized sprites, and sprites will almost always appear stretched and unclear. This is usually difficult to work around, so this is where Piskel App comes in.
PiskelApp: Piskelapp is an online app to create pixel sprites. It is lacking some tools for the drawing process. There are no layers or even stable ways to copy and paste, or enlarge a small part of an image. It is however especially geared towards pixel art, open source, and provides a few services that are essential to us:
- Piskel App allows you to resize your sprites without losing their crispness. We will be able to use images with 300x300 resolution that will still look exactly like 32x32 pixel art, hence tricking Unity into accepting the style.
- Piskel App saves all sprites to an online gallery linked to my g-mail account, and will hence be greatly useful in keeping our work stored and accessible from everywhere.
- The app provides frames and onion skin to animate sprites, and allows you to export your work into a sprite sheet, meaning it can be directly imported and used in Unity.
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After Cian and I brainstormed some room ideas on Monday afternoon, tuesday morning was spent writing out a neater version of said plans, a vague project summary, and a list of assets that would have to be completed in the near future.
This list, for me, included the following categories: Wall and Floor Tiles, Animations, Characters, Monsters, Furniture, Speech Bubbles, Items.
Cian spent the day working on a prototype combat room and a prototype survival trap room. In the first, the player would have to dodge some bullet-like attacks and pick up a gun to shoot the monsters whilst they are vulnerable. The survival room would simply be a case of being aware of spear traps and dodging them, as well as deactivating them, to get to the exit.
He managed to finish rough prototypes for both of these rooms by the end of the day, using placeholder assets from our previous projects. We had worked on a twin-stick shooter before that would also utilize pixel art, and hence had some assets to work with and scripts to recycle, especially for the shooting and movement. I will probably be able to salvage animation controllers as well.
I made some good progress on assets in the meantime, and finally settled on an idea for the player character's look. Below are a few samples of my work throughout yesterday and today.
Assets so far completed:
Tiles: Wooden floor, wooden wall, concrete wall, concrete floor, carpet floor
Furniture: Wardobe, Dresser, Round Table, Table, Chair, Desk, Bookshelf, Vase, 4 Plants, Cuttlery, Teapot, Plate, Glass, Wine Glass, Lightbulb on and off, window
Characters: Player, idle-down animation, idle-up animation, walk down animation, walk-up animation.
Items: Gun, Knife.
Monsters: Curl-up-Monster
I have also begun arranging the first combat room. We are using a default sprite diffuse material on all sprites in order to let them be affected by the light. This way we can create moody and dark atmospheres and have areas in complete dark.
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