Sprite design

Hello this is Darragh O Dowd and I was in charge of the character and building pixel art for our game.

We started off by making a mindmap of all the possible different interpretations of border that we felt we could fit into a game, dividing them roughly between mechanical concepts and thematic ones, with us eventually going for a mix of the two with a fast paced game where you defend your kingdom from demons for as long as you can, in an endless game, this concept was seamus’s idea. We then split into roles with seamus on programming, Emily on UI and kira on background and me on enemies and buildings.

We fleshed out  the concepts a bit more taking the rhythmic pace of all actions happening at once from crypt of the necrodancer, with turns being short and representative of days with all movements happening at the end. Then in terms of enemies we decided to keep it simple with it being a numbers game, enemies armies advancing on a grid towards your nearest village and needing to be scared off by the player surrounding them with more soldiers then them, the player also being able to permanently eliminate them if they surround them. As a part of this I proposed in order to reduce clutter from too many enemies on one tile that enemies fuse creating bigger and stronger monsters with 4 total tiers.

Finally at the art direction size we decided to go for pixel art as it felt that it would be the best way to avoid a clashing of styles with so many artists on the team, we spent a while deciding on a colour palette before choosing one called Mulfuk 32. I also began prototyping enemies and had trouble choosing between 8 and 16 bit as I felt with how small the enemies would be on screen there needed to be simplicity, eventually I decided on 16 bit as I realised 8 made monsters far too abstract to recognise and was even worse if you clump them together. I made great effort to use simple shapes and colour language when designing the sprites using a red tone for all the enemies who I made skeletons as I had experience with making them and felt they were easy to simplify, then I used blue for all player controlled things such as soldiers villages and your castle. The most technically difficult unity to make was the player soldier as I decided I wanted to accentuate their blue tabard for colour language purposes, but this required me to make their design very abstract so I had to play with it a lot to get them to be recognisable as soldiers, this was made harder by their very small size giving me little room to work with, eventually I found giving them a spear solved this. i also went through countless ideas on the 4^th tier of enemy before deciding on the final

During the design process I was constantly zooming out to make sure they were readable from a distance and removing as much clutter from the designs as possible which mildly hurt my soul. I made the buildings last and gave them desaturated outlines to reduce clutter from units placed on them.