Character Art

Posted on 20th April, 2013 by Alex Dawon

Here’s some slightly older artwork of the main game character which I’ve realised wasn’t on the blog up until now. The first is for use in cinematic cut scenes.

Player art used in cinematic cut scene events.

The second is a piece of concept artwork done to try and figure out what the lead character was going to look like, there were many sketches drawn before arriving at this point and the character evolved slowly as the project has progressed.

Concept artwork used in developing the main characters look and style.

Hopefully this should show what I was trying to achieve on a smaller scale with the sprites in the previous post.

Run Sprite Run!

Posted on 18th April, 2013 by Alex Dawon

It’s been rather quiet around these parts just lately but that should be changing very soon and to kick things off here’s some new artwork I’ve been creating for the main characters sprite animations during fight screens.

Player artwork used in fight screens when switching cover.

Things have been progressing nicely while finishing the work for hire contracts I’ve been working on as well as having a week off to go snow boarding. A lot of the updates to the game have been programming and tool related which isn’t very exciting visually hence the lack of updates. For those interested the game is now building for Android though I can’t create the APK as the game is already too big for the free version of Xamarin, I’ve programmed the new cut scene engine to be used for fight screen intros and story related stuff. I’ve also created a script based tool for animating and exporting XML for the cut scene panel artwork and animation curves. The other good news is that Firing Pin is now a member of Microsofts BizSpark Programme which gives some neat benefits including free copies off Visual Studio Pro and a 12 month Windows 8 developer account… Yay!

Until Next Time!

Happy New Year!

Posted on 5th January, 2013 by Alex Dawon

It appears I have started the new year with a bang… the bang being my brain exploding as I try to convert the games tiling map code over from the easy peasy orthographic style of mapping to the much more head hurting isometric style.

It’s taken me a couple of days to really get anywhere solid, however now the game is rendering the map on screen in “roughly” the correct position and updating correctly as you move, hurrah! I think I may have even developed a new technique for rendering tile maps as the usual diamond and staggered ways weren’t quite cutting it, I feel an explanation of that will be coming later. There are still some kinks to work out before I can tick it as done but it’s nice knowing that I will soon be able to get working away on some decent world art tiles.

Here’s a comparison of the place holder orthographic art along with my rather neater looking isometric art test. Can you guess which is which 😉

How the world is changing from orthographic to isometric

Until next time… Over & Out!

The First Of Many

Posted on 17th December, 2012 by Alex Dawon

Kicking off the development blog I have a few images of how the user interface screens are currently looking.

The aim at the moment is to create a playable prototype or proof of concept, I’ve spent most of the time so far programming the core game mechanics and up until now there hasn’t been anything that visual to show. The games user interface is the most fully developed area of the game art wise at present, the dimensions are intended for mobile phone resolution however to cut down on development time I’ve locked the desktop version of the game to the same sizes as the mobile format.

In terms of details of the game you will have to stay tuned, for now I’m just going to say its an RPG with a hint of Rogue Like in there and it’s targeted at the main mobile, tablet and desktop platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, iOS, Windows Phone).