Devlog - Presentation and Graphics

Devlog - Presentation and Graphics

Hi all, for my game this week I worked on and implemented all the sprites. These included the map, the background, the enemy, and the player. 

Creation Process

Player and Enemy Sprites

In creating the sprites for the enemies and player, I utilised concept art that I had previously drawn for my game concept document. I drew the sprites on my iPad using a stylus, on the app GoodNotes. I decided on simple head icons for both the enemy and player as it was significantly easier than creating any full body designs. Drawing an entire zombie or human body from head to toe not only requires better drawing but also more drawing and animating as the sprite would need to cover all movement directions. I drew the ‘heads’ using influence and inspiration from simple cartoons I found on google. Once the drawings were complete I exported them to my computer where I used an online photo editor (ww.photopea.com) to cut away the background around the image, leaving me with just the PNG images of the heads, allowing me to implement them into the game.

 

The Game Map

Creating the game map proved to be significantly more difficult than the player and enemy sprites. In order to successfully create a hand sketched sprite for the map I needed to draw it in sections. These sections were the different shapes I had tile mapped to create the map earlier. Each drawing had to match the shape of the tile map and couldn’t be stretched or transformed as it would warp and ruin the drawn lines. In the end I needed 9 different shapes drawn in order to cover the whole map. I began by creating the shapes in a pixel art software in order to get all the sizing right as I needed perfect squares and right angles to match the tile map. From here I took each shape and imported it into my GoodNotes. From here I drew a number of designs for each shape in order to create variety in the game map. Once I had done all my drawings they were exported to my computer where I again used the online photo editor www.photopea.com to crop and cut the images into PNGs of the sprite needed. Finally I was able to import the sprites into my game where I could scale and position each one over its receptive tile map piece. This definitely was not the best way I could’ve created my map, had I properly planned this prior to creating the map many weeks ago, this process would've been significantly smoother. Due to my methods, each small piece of the map (with the exception of the border which is split into two large pieces mirrored) are their own game objects, leaving me with a long list. Fortunately, because all these game objects were placed on top of a part of the tile map, no colliders or components are needed as the tile map component has it all covered.

 

The Background

The background for my game is a simple ‘scrunched up paper’ image I took from the internet. Hand drawing would not have worked in this situation and I only needed something simple that was white but not completely white, in order to give the game the feeling of an actual floor. 

Testing and Issues

In creating my player, enemy and map sprites I encountered a few visual issues. Firstly, the player and enemy sprites appear too small on the screen and are experiencing low resolutions. This makes them seem blurry and poor quality as all the lines of the drawing smudge together. I am yet to discover a fix for this that hopefully won’t be redrawing and redesigning the sprites all together. Secondly, while all shapes/blocks inside the map were drawing at the same scale, the border was not. In trying to save myself some time, I drew half of the map border in one image before then importing it and mirroring it in the game. When it has been scaled up and placed over the tile map, it has not retained its quality and, similar to the head sprites, looks blurry and out of place. This may require some visual trickery or a complete redesign.  Finally, the player sprite seems to rotate based on the position of the cursor, which is unintentional and likely a forgotten feature I’ve yet to fully remove from my player controller script. 

*Last minute addition*

Upon uploading my game into ITCH I played it to ensure it ran and the issue of low quality head sprites was no more! Seems that itch.io runs the game at a higher resolution than my unity game window.