Desolate Echo – Week 4

This week I’ve been working with Victor Kristiansson on a re-design of the sprite of our player avatar.
(note that only the hull will be addressed in this post, as the turret is a separate entity)

Original sprite

New sprite

The original sprite received some feedback saying that it looked “too box-like”  or “like a screw”, and needed to look more “like a hovercraft”. So how would we achieve that?

First off, the hovercraft is designed mainly for mining metals and minerals deep underground, where monsters and rockfalls are a constant health risk.
For that, we envisioned a stout, durable frame with thick armour plates.
Now, it can be pretty hard to design a strongbox that is not box-like but I think we did a pretty good job of it.

We tried to give the hovercraft a rounder, vaguely egg-like overall shape by expanding the cargo hold sideways, a move that effectively eliminated the screw shape. Then we switched the colours of the thrusters in the back and front to a dark grey. We also gave the details on the hull increased definition through the use of more shades of red, even though we might have given it somewhat more contrast. It’s probably fine, as the player isn’t likely to see the whole craft lit up anyway.

We used Krita for this. Well, I used pen and paper and Victor implemented my design into the program.

I also completed the map we’ll be using in the alpha, it looks like this:

The player will begin somewhere roughly in the center of the map. The big square on the top right is where the boss will be located.

We wanted to have a few big caverns with connecting tunnels that grow more twisting the closer the player gets to the boss, creating a challenge in using the searchlight effectively and limiting the player’s mobility.

I used Tiled for this one, as it is a program that is designed to, well… work with tiles. We already had an existing image of the map, so I just took that and put it in an image layer in Tiled and then I created a tileset from the tiles that we had and applied them into the tile layer.

I’m actually a little surprised as to how easy the program was to use, I didn’t even have to read a tutorial or anything, it was very self-explanatory. I like that in a software tool, tip o’ the hat to the creators.

I guess that wraps up this week. More to come.