Dev Log 6 - Production

[Semester 2: Weeks 6-7]

Production has been in full swing for Kalidax Farming Program for the past few weeks. As the team's character artist and producer, I've been drawing more concepts for the game's aliens and started work on sprites. As of writing this devlog, 3 sprites have been completed: the main character, first stage of the sprog alien, and the first stage of the longstrider alien. 

The main character took the longest to draw. Compared to the first stages of the aliens, the main character was much larger and had more parts. An additional time sink was the asymmetrical design. Since the sprites are drawn at a 3/4 view, they couldn't by flipped without requiring unique parts be drawn. The technique of erasing everything but the contour was inapplicable here so I had to draw new parts from scratch. Thankfully, some parts like the torso and helmet could be copied but the limbs could not.

The sprog and longstrider originally had duller colour palettes. These palettes were changed when our team met for a sprint review and one of our team's secondary artist presented the artwork for the alien seeds. Because we hadn't communicated beforehand what the colour palettes for the aliens were, my rendition of the sprog ended up with brownish yellow skin whereas the seed was bright green. Sampling the colours from the seed, I went back and applied a new palette to the sprog which I ended up liking much better. 

At this point, the longstrider's dull palette no longer matched with the sprog's new paint job. I applied several different blend modes to the longstrider and experimented with their strength and hue. These tests were then brought back to my team where I had our team lead vote on the new colour palette he liked best. We ended up picking the same one and I cemented the changes.

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Our team is trying out Unity's 2D rigging system and PSD importer for the first time. To accommodate this, each sprite is made up of multiple parts each placed on their own respective layers in a PSB file. When imported into the engine, the layer data and position of each part is retained. This allows us to spend less time positioning parts and more time rigging. 

We ran into some issues when trying to use the static placeholder sprites I included in the PSB files before our second playtest. Eventually we were able to replace the placeholder for the main character with the new one by selecting it from the PSB but the same solution was ineffective for the aliens. My job this week is to figure out what's causing the errors and how to fix it. Once that problem is solved, I'll be able to start rigging and animating the sprites.