Let's Talk About Something Else

At last I am free from making sprites. For now at least. Last week I made every version of the main character sprite, nine in total. If you are not sure what I mean it is as follows: In our game we have a main character. You can upgrade her clothes and weapon independently, with three levels each. This means that I had to create sprites of the main character with a first level suit and weapons one, two and three. Then do the same for both the level two suit and the level three suit. I've attached a image below showing how the main character's sprite changes if you only upgrade her weapon and not her suit.

Weapon progression from level one to level 3.

However I feel like I've talked enough about how I make these sprites and that it is time for me to talk about something else, so that is what I'm going to do.

To upgrade the character you enter a menu and select what aspect of your character you want to upgrade. To show which aspect you can upgrade and what it will change we have pictures in this menu. These pictures are not pixel art like the rest of the game. Instead they are straight up painted images me and my team members have made. We choose to it this way because none of our artists are really comfortable making large scale pixel art. It also meant that we could use any concept we made and turn it into an in game artifact.

Seeing as I had made all the things related to the main character up to this point I felt it was fitting for me to take on the responsibility to create these upgrade images. I had already made the concept art for her level one suit which meant that most of the work was already complete and all that was left was to colour it. When I first started planning this I had it in my mind that it would be fully rendered with material and lighting. My producer however was shocked by how long I estimated it to take and said that it wasn't acceptable, so I proposed to only add some flat colours and and some shadows to that which wouldn't take nearly as long. This my producer thought was more reasonable.

The steps I took to get to the final product. I think the colours are a bit off though.

In the end I'm quite happy with the result even though I only put in a couple of hours into it. There is definitely improvements to be made if I wanted to but time is becoming sparse, and I will probably not be able to implement them because there are more important things that needs to be made/improved.