Comparisons to AW are inevitable. We understood that from the start. That was partially the point. When your sprites are 16x16, blue, and cute military shapes, there's not a whole lot you can do to shake that comparison.

That being said, as the artist here I put in a great deal of time and effort trying my best to establish our own unique looks and designs for units. A lot of the early alpha artwork hit too close to home for everyone's comfort level, so over the last few days I've been spending my time going back and re-doing early artwork.

Attached bellow is a large pool of how I develop the units for Super Combat Squadron. It may look like from the outside that I just iron out a new unit bam all at once, but it actually takes a great many iterations and trial and error on my part before I stumble into a design I think works.

Top Left: The redesigns for the rocket car and long range Anti Air missle launcher. The originals as mentioned looked far too close to home and needed a complete overhaul.

Top Right: Very early artwork I did for the cars, APCs, and heavy rocket infanty. The nozzle on the gun took many attempts to get a shape I was satisfied with.

Bellow the two of those in the middle are the now outdated AA Machine Gun Tank and Heavy Tank designs, which all iterate too close to AW, and since then I've already designed the Heavy Tank into its new state, seen bellow in the Bottom Right.

The last unit who is going to undergo these changes is the aforementioned AA Machine Gun tank, which will be getting a new look in the coming days.

EDIT: While we're talking about it, I have another nice tidbit for you all. I keep all my work from the earliest designs, I have here the earliest building iterations to show off:

Many designs never saw the light of day, or were done simply for fun, like a random fist build. Maybe in the future they'll see use again, but for now they languish on my harddrive.

General Revamp

As I work on newer and newer commanders, the early ones start to look worse in comparison to the improved style of the later ones, so today I spent a great deal of today simply touching up all the commanders, fixing jagged edges I missed initially, changing parts I was unsatisfied with, and general polish.

As of yet they're still far from the final complete ready for launch final versions, but with each pass they get closer to that eventual state. These four will likely be the only commanders you see for a while as there are lots of other areas that need artwork, and four is a nice round number to do testing with once we've gotten to the point we can implement the distinct gameplay difference commanders bring.

Designing a Commander

Hey everyone, today I'm going to take you through the process I use to make the game's Commanding Officers.

As always, the first step is gather references. You might feel like you have enough creative juice in your head to do it from imagination alone, but it still helps. Once you have an idea in your mind, it's time to draw!

To the left is my first drawing. I did it entirely in black then masked out details afterwards, though the masking part isn't necessary. It's very important your character have a recognizable silhouette, as he or she will be among many other COs and you need to be able to recognize the character at a glance without wondering if something is an arm or a gun or a leg or something.

On the right is my second pass, now that I have the character design in mind, I go about drawing the silhouette for the actual game sprite. I draw at a much larger size than will actually be in game and reduce its size in the next step.

Now that I have the larger design, I shrink the artwork to match the same general size and shape as the other CO I've completed already, so that he fits on the HUD. At this stage I tweaked the silhouette slightly, adjusting his belt higher and fixing the pointy waist.

Color time! I slice off the parts that won't fit in the HUD and block out the general shapes and colors he will eventually use. The design is still in flux at this point, and I decide he looks better in a rain coat-ish jacket and adjust the design to match. The head is too small however compared to the other CO, and I adjust it larger as I add more details.

Almost done now. I polish the overall design and add team colored elements to it. I feel like he suffers too much from 'blueberry head' at this point the way his hat makes his head feel divorced from the rest of the design, which I fix in the final version.


 Last stage, final copy. The hat is unified, his saluting hand is cleaned up, armband shrunk, clothing folds shrunk, medals added and parts from the original design are re-implemented, like the design of his lower pockets.


I did experiment a great deal during this process, such as the shoulder straps from the original design, but they just didn't pan out looking nice compared to the original design.

Progress Report.

Hey everyone, brief update on how we're coming along.

I'm happy to introduce the first 99% done Commanding Officer, who is as of yet still unnamed but not un-arted.

As you can see, she went through multiple iterations to get to the stage she's at now, but over all I'm satisfied with the look and feel, the earlier ones were too stiff and amateur (but they were done relatively quickly at the time). I may make the earning team colored in the future as well, as at the smallest size it can be difficult to tell what team color she is.

I also have animations to show off. As usual, all designs are in flux as we develop the game to see what does or doesn't work:

Left side: idle/walking animations
Right side: shooting animations.
Not all units can shoot or have shooting animations as of yet, but in the future some of those will gain some.

All units are done with a very simple 3 frame cycle. Two frames for an idling animation, sped up when moving to give the illusion of walking. The firing animation cycles between the first and third frame, and no other art is necessary. I considered early on giving units animations for facing all four (or eight) possible directions of motion, but ultimately as the only artist it would be too great of an investment and compromised with this solution.

The engine itself is coming along nicely. It's playable but not yet solid enough to be called a game, despite its many game-like elements. In the coming weeks we plan on pushing out an alpha with all the core mechanics like unit building, base capturing, resource generation, and good pathing, but we're still some ways away from that.

Mountains from Mole Hills

Today I'm going to take you step by step through the design process I use when making tiles, using the new and improved Mountain tile as a showcase.

Step 1 when making any new artwork is always and forever: gather reference. Google Images, Deviant Art, studying how other games you like did it, whatever floats your boat. Maybe some people's imaginations are just that good to just go at it, but I always look at at least something before starting.

Once you've nailed down what you're shooting for, for pixel art my first step is usually to draw it in full size to get the forms down the way I like it before resizing.

It only takes a few minutes, but making this basic artwork at 512x512  helps me get started when I'm having trouble visualizing the appearance I'm going for at 16x16.

Working with my standard square brush I use for most everything, I paint out the mountain shape as it will look tiny.

Next, I take my artwork and shrink it down to the size it'll be in game. It won't look like what you see on the right yet though, as after being shrunk, Photoshop or whatever program you use will likely apply some kind of filtering to it. What I do at this stage is go (in photoshop) 'Image > Mode > Indexed Color.'

In this menu, you will be able to force your artwork to meet certain constraints, in our case, to use the existing palette I've made already. 'Palette: Local (Perceptual)' and 'Forced: Custom...' will allow me to load in my palette, which it will make the image match as closely as possible, and will resemble the image to the right.

After forcing it into my palette, you may notice the mountain artwork is a bit flat and drab. In pixel art, every single pixel plays a great deal of importance to the overall appearance, so I take some time now to clean up the compressed artwork into a better looking template for Mountains.

Once I've become satisfied with how the Mountain tile looks as it does on the left, we still aren't finished; it is a few sizes larger than 16x16, and is entirely stand alone. This Mountain will serve as a base and frame of reference for all the 16x16 mountain tiles I will make in the future.

Tada. Using the base Mountain, I stretch, squash, repaint, and remake until I've reached the artwork you see on the right. The mountain is 3 16x16 tiles wide and currently 4 16x16 tiles tall.

It's still missing a great deal of the variations required to work in any possible configuration in the tilemap, but using the Mountain template from before, I'll be able to identify the missing pieces and draw them into place for use with no effort while keeping the overall appearance consistent.