Unmasked Devlog — Asset Creation
Welcome to my blog! My name is Devnith and I am a hobbyist game developer. After getting comfortable with the Unity Engine I had an vague idea for my first game development project by myself. At first my aim was to create a top-down RPG using pixel art. But when I actually started creating assets I soon realized that my animation skills are very weak; I took hours to animate simple idle animations. Even though I was confident in drawing digital art with my Wacom Intous, I sucked when it came to frame by frame animation.
This is when I had another idea for a game. I needed something that I can finish easily and quickly, but also interesting to play again and again. The solution was an endless game; And in my case I chose an endless enemy spawning game. I also wanted to give a twist to traditional cultural art elements of my country; That way I can tell a story with diversity for the player. So I fabricated the storyline behind the game; A small girl with orange hair stranded in a forest alone, has to use torch fire to eliminate the devils with masks who come to get her. So summoning all my willpower to the tip of my stylus, I started drawing again. This time I used a far simple style of drawing which eased my ability to animate. First I sketched the main character’s key animations.
Then in a new layer I colored the character without outlines, making it simple for me to animate. For the asset creation process I used a free and open-source art software called Krita.
The reason I used orange for the color of the girl’s hair was confusing to some people because even though I am making a game with traditional elements there are no orange haired people in my country, Sri Lanka. The reason behind it was that I thought orange, white and pine green colors will go together, and also I had an idea of incorporating a small fox into the game! Thankfully, the final animations came out acceptable.
With the main character done all that I was lacking to set-up the scene was the background and tree sprites. I exported the tree sprites as separate PNG files to add them in different sorting layers in Unity.
With that done, I was ready to set-up the first scene in Unity. This was just the basic steps of the asset creation process, I have many more assets to make including enemy assets.
In the next development blog post, I will create the Unity scene and add basic movement scripts for the girl. With that said, thanks for reading, Stay Awesome!
Art software I’m using: Krita
My graphic tablet (It’s cheap but gets the work done): Wacom Intous
