The art and progress for completing our teams first post-Zeebi project has been coming along, and today I’m going to post a very brief rundown of the artistic process for creating the character. One of the primary goals for my work was to feature high-quality art for our games, at least more than what is usually seen in the average educational title. Early on I created some illustrations for the characters, just trying to work out the flow and style for everyone. Going from some rough sketches to something more illustrative.
- Rapidly producing ideas means finding your mark quickly, even if the initial quality is less than stellar.
We had a general idea of the appearance of the end product, keeping characters identifiable, aesthetically pleasant, and meeting the initial limitations such as the age of our audience, the 2D aspect of the game, and the input provided by our sound engineer Rick, who introduced the concept and game design.
Moving forward with color, variety and other characters.
At the animation stage a lot of technical exploration was needed to find the right balance between quick development, high-quality and technically efficient. Everything from hand drawn cells, to vector art, to using a variety of software to ‘tween between detailed illustrated frames was tried. My goal was to have something on-par with the detail and fluidity of Vanillaware’s games, easily the best 2D game art on the market.
Getting closer.
After trying and failing with a combination of hand-painted cells and 3D animation, we settled on cell-shaded 3D for the characters of Jade. Though this early example is extremely rough work in progress, a lot of mileage will be gained with fine-tuning the shader, creating a finished animation, and trimming wherever applicable for performance, it’s a good hint at what the final characters will look like.
Finally, since choosing to use 3D, we can reuse all of the content for any future games, and won’t be technically locked into one particular style, which means less waste and more variety in the future.
Our cell-rendered version of our beloved character.
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