Asset Creation: Graphics
So, we decided to make our first game for the playdate, as a kind of test to our processes. We just wanted to remove all of the things that blocked us in the past (mainly art).
But not necessarily less colors equals easier time… games are such a hard medium to create things on, it involves many competences. Drawings and rendering is just part of it.
Also, less colors should be great for a good artist, but we here are not that, we are indoor druids goddamit, we can barely draw stick figures! So in our case (and many beginners cases), this actually makes stuff harder.
As we, or more specifically, Druid B, were drawing some concepts by hand, we realized we needed to be really careful with the shapes because we only have two colors. It is incredibly hard… You need to render your thoughts on the paper/computer in a way that a house looks like a house, a wall needs to be different from wood or the electric pole right beside it… Otherwise things will not render well…
The ideas we considered were: modeling basic shapes and then using it as a basis for the pixel art.
Still, soon we realized that you know… drawing is hard… really hard… and we are not equipped to make our assets consistently. In one image we would have the light hit here or there in a way that felt unnatural and we got disheartened.
But we are indoor druids goddamit! We trive in the wilderness of code!
That was when we decided to write a shader and let blender take care of the lighting while we took care of shapes and composition. We quickly ended with this scene:
We made it in a way that the sky can be turned into the transparency color, so we can make day/night variations. We also made it so that any object that “touches” the sky, has an outline in the parts that do so. This makes the objects read well no matter the time of the day…
Well, with that, we started to make some cool areas for the game:
