New Skillset Unlocked!

Technical Bits

Name of the Game: Space Investigator

My goal in the project: artist and designer

Tech demo here

What we want to address: how are effective platforming levels designed in a way that doesn't make going back and forth to look for clues/evidence a tedious process?

Me, Doing Art?!

I can't stress enough that I didn't think I could be an artist.

Let's unpack that statement a bit. I do think of myself as a writer and a poet, and I believe that writing is an art. I'm talking about visual artistry here: drawing, painting, digital art. You get the drill.

I'm also not saying I'm particularly good at it. My work is fairly basic and a little flat, but hey, it's a start.

So yeah, today I'm calling myself an artist.

Jamieson learned the power of art!

"How did you get here," you may ask? It started with a playing card, and it lead to the internet.

I was assigned the somewhat vague role of "artist" for my class video game prototype assignment (my first response? "Writing is an art." Like I said: writer.) "Well," I thought. "I hope the art doesn't need to be very good." I'll let you decide whether or not it is, in the end. My partner, Soneer, was amenable to the fact that I had virtually no clue what to do, and said we could just work through it. He'd handle the programming, I just had to go find out how to make some basic assets.

Let the games begin.

First thing first, we needed a theme and a concept to start with. We both instantly gravitated (no pun intended . . . okay, pun intended) to a sci-fi themed space platformer where gravity would be a factor. But not just any platformer! So running and gunning in our game. Instead, a mystery. The player would traverse the treacherous landscape and solve crimes. A space cop, if you will.

Little did we know, another brilliant mind beat us to it.

With our concepts in mind, we discussed production and ideas to implement. We were both (mercifully) okay with old-school 8-bit style graphics. The game would take place on a moon (not necessarily THE Moon) with a colony of peaceful people who were beset by saboteurs trying to destroy the civilization there. During the game, players would meet aliens who they could not understand, and would have to find translators by exploring the elevated platforms throughout the levels. After this, they find clues to what happened by talking to aliens and making dedications to answer that age-old question, "Whodunit?" Once we had this sorted out, we set off into the wild green yonder of creating our masterpiece.

Well, *I* set off to YouTube, to figure out what in the blue hell I was doing.

I won't regal you with a blow-by-blow account of me watching hours of videos about doing digital art, but I will tell you that I spent hours watching videos about how to make digital art. I will, however, absolutely give major props to YouTuber Achebit and his series, "How To Pixel Art." Check his stuff out here. If it wasn't for this, I might have spent even more time blundering around the internet, praying for mercy.

Or just wishing I could play WWF No Mercy, one of my all-time favorite games

I also futzed around with programs to use for making the art. I got Photoshop from SJSU's software program thingy, but was instantly daunted by the sheer scale of it. I used to use Photoshop all the time at my old job, but mostly just for photo manipulation. I also tried a Japanese program with no eraser tool, but seriously there was NO ERASER TOOL. Then I actually went back to good ol' Achebit, who transitioned to using the unfortunately-named GIMP early in his videos. Works for me.

My Process

I've had a bit of trouble with GIMP, mostly because of the toolbox being wonky and also because the select and drag options are kinda craptastic, but overall it has served me well enough to do what I need to do. Then I needed *ahem* 'inspiration' (see: something to steal ideas from). I found some pixel art samples and came up with the concept I wanted to create: a character in a spacesuit and trench coat, partially inspired by an action figure of Gambit from the X-Men I keep on my desk. I basically traced out some pixel images I saw online and changed them to include the features I wanted from the Gambit figure. My first efforts are below, recorded for posterity.

Glorious!

I wasn't thrilled with these two for a couple reasons, the most glaring to me being the difficulty I imagined in animation the tall one's awkward limbs and the small one's stumpy stature. I needed something to reference that I could see animated examples of. Then I thought of Risk of Rain, which I helped demo in class. It has a fairly simple sprite style (though I realized later that it has a lot more going on than one might expect at first glance) and I started looking through Google images of the game, and found this handsome devil, the bandit:

Bingo: Inspired

He even had the jack and hat. This would become the basis for my main character design, a character I had dubbed Buzz Aasimov (inspired, of course, by Buzz Aldrin and Isaac Aasimov). Having something that I knew was a functional sprite was a great jumping off point for me. I've worked on a few animations for Buzz, and created a simple sprite sheet.

Pictured: a lot of time, in digital form

I kind of followed a similar formula making other assets, For space backgrounds, I've just looked at pictures of actual skies and tried a bunch of brush and pen patterns in GIMP. For blocks and pillars I just kind of think about other games I've played and how they look. Generally I worked in either 16x16 or 32x32 pixels, then expand when I add animations. If I need to work on the go, I use a draft notebook of graph paper and colored pencils. For animations, I similarly think of games I've seen in the past and just the way people (or aliens) might move. I try to give sprites a bit of bounciness or quirky things to do. Backgrounds are still intimidating, but I give it my best, experimenting with all the tools GIMP has. And when I need something like a space ship, I just use Google image search and copy an idea. I look around my environment for inspiration.

In the below image, the space background was actually inspired by my tattoo sleeve, and the ship was a toy I found on Google.

Stylin' and profilin'

It is interesting to note, I remembered part way through this project that I used to effectively do the same thing in Mario Paint for the SNES when I was a teenager. It had a similar pixel art program and a mouse that attached to the SNES console, and I would basically copy characters like Link and Samus and put them on paint-by-numbers-like backgrounds. Maybe the art was in me all along. After all, someone once said, "Good artist copy; great artists steal."

Some aliens who inhabit the world of Space Investigator