This week on Twitter I've been speaking to one of the developers of Fabular: Once Upon A Space Time and with their okay, spend some time drawing the Lost Count, a character from the game as a CO in Super Combat Squadron.

It took just over four hours from start to finish, starting with rough sketches that are cleaned up, shrunk down, and eventually turned into what you see on the right.

I recorded myself while working this time so you can see the full four hours just bellow compressed down into one ten minute video of the Lost Count from Fabular from conception to final product.

Communication is Key

With the addition of our new project manager, we've adopted a few new practices that have enabled us to start to develop again, primarily among them the Sprint methodology.

Every Monday we (digitally) sit down and have a meeting discussing the sprint; a small slice of the large pie to focus on for the week such as designing and implementing a new font, team-coloring all the GUI assets, or setting up an asset sharing platform for all the team members. 

Once we iron out the week's goals each morning we perform a stand-up meeting focusing on the big three questions:

1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What obstacles are impeding my progress?

This has proved invaluable to our productivity. It's almost become an in-joke to shout "My status is blocked!" Knowing what you've done, what you are going to do, and letting the team know if there is something you need them to do to progress something you are working on has greased the development wheels immensely.

Communication is key though; proper communication. Posting bug reports or screenshots to Skype logs is fast and easy in the moment but ends up lost in minutes as soon as something else is said. Trello is our acting bug tracker, backlog, and sprint manager, as you've seen posted before. It's very useful for sorting and tagging members to specific cards. We use labels for User Stories, Programming cards, Bugs, Graphics work, and general Tasks, all of which can be filtered by.

So what is in store for our next sprint? You'll have to check back to see the minutes Monday.

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.

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.