INSIDE OMNOMZOMB: CHARACTER ART INSIGHTS

DOING CHARACTER ART FOR THAT’S MY ZOMBIE! HAS BEEN A TOUGH, BUT REWARDING AND ENRICHING JOURNEY. I HAVE ACQUIRED SOME NEW SKILLS AND A NEW WORK ETHIC FROM STEPPING A LITTLE OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE AND TAKING ON A NEW CHALLENGE.

Prototype:

We decided on a 2D pixel art style game to go with the arcade beat-em-up genre after the first week. I’ve done some pixel art before; it’s time consuming, but very rewarding once you finish everything. The hardest part is trying to animate pixel art.

Vertical Slice: Zombie/Ghost

The prototype zombie was my first shot at pixel animation. It fulfilled the milestone requirements, but my workflow was very inefficient due to a lack of planning.

After the vertical slice, I had a discussion with the art lead in order to streamline our workflow on our assets. We divided the responsibilities among the three artists we had on the team: Me and Marco would handle all of the character art, with me focusing primarily on regular units, and Marco on the bosses and Shane working with our creative director for background art.

Settling on a finalized zombie took a lot of discussion and an concept reviews. Art team didn’t have muchdirection aside from “zombie guy.” So it wasn’t until our first meeting that we really sat down and hammered out the details of what he looks like.

Eventually we settled on a design that we all worked on together and I had the job of rendering and animating the sketch into an asset to be put in the game.

For creating a manageable workload, we decided to break down each asset into 3 tasks that can be easily completed and passed off to another team.

Unfortunately, we didn’t perfect this method for the vertical slice, so a few assets didn’t make it in, and the quality of some others had to be sacrificed.

VERTICAL SLICE: WOLF ENEMIES

I’m not too happy with the results of the wolf enemies, deadlines crept up on us and they had to be rushed a bit. But they made it in for the milestone.

The most important lesson I took from this milestone is to perfect my workflow to be more efficient without sacrificing any quality.

ALPHA: ZOMBIE ENEMIES

Initially, our goal was to have normal human enemies that can be easily pallet swapped and made interchangeable for variation. We decided to change all the enemies to monster enemies to be more lighthearted and cartoon-y. I would be lying if I said the change didn’t make my heart sink at the thought of how much more work got added to the milestone, but with proper planning and communication with the leads.

ALPHA: VAMPIRE ENEMY

The vampire enemy is when I would say I started to perfect this character building method. There is a noticeable increase in quality from the wolf enemies to now, I was able to make them almost as fast as the werewolves, but with much better quality.

ALPHA: DEVIL ARMY

I had the most fun making the devil army sprites. I decided to take some creative freedom and break the proportions we set for other characters. I feel like having some character variation in body type is important to keep the game visually interesting.

In the end I feel like making all of the characters the exact same dimension of 128 x 128 was a mistake. Even with with a different body type, everything seems a bit too uniform. A true arcade style beat em up needs characters of varying size to better signify their strengths and weaknesses.

ALPHA: ZOMBIE KING

Although I didn’t do the main work on the Zombie King, I rendered the sprite into pixel art (off of Marco’s design). Here is some of the concept work I’ve done for the first boss.

To add some more visual Hierarchy we decided to only give important characters the thick borders (Main Characters, Bosses) then regular 1 pixel thick outlines for normal enemies.

CLOSING

Working on this project has helped me learn a lot about my own work ethic and how to better budget my time to meet deadlines. I’m looking forward to another semester of Game Design Workshop to further develop my skills and add to my portfolio, thanks for reading!