On Ludum Dare 40, I wrote about how I spent 2 days drawing characters for our game. It was a follow up to the post I made on LD 38 about Krita, the free open-source program. Today, I’ll be retreading the whole thing, but applied to the art of our latest game, Wizsnooks!
The games developed here at Whales and Games usually consists of a programmer, a sound effects person and, in the lack of any other art-people, me. So, during the brainstorm of ideas for our game, someone suggested mixing snookers with roguelike elements in a medieval setting. Seeing the appeal, I quickly sketched a concept of sorts for it:
When we finally decided to use that theme as our game, we had to start thinking about the whole “looks” of the thing. I even tried at one point going with non-lined art to parody Dark Souls or something, but in the end, we chose to stick to my classic style. I even sketched many possible faces for our protagonist white ball.
And Just Monika.
I could go into detail about the story behind every enemy of the game, the tiles and the weapons, but the core of what I want to comment is this. Because of how our team is managed, the programmer(s) can focus on making a great game and the sound person usually does a few tracks and then offers main support to the programmers. I, the lead artist, have no real knowledge of programming and can barely use the tools to upload my own assets. However, having one sole task, I get to draw a lot, and then some, and then some more. Here’s a few screenshots of the development of art assets of the game.
I really want to thank my team, since, otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to participate in game development in this fashion. Dedicating pretty much the whole game jam time to art lets us make more with our time. If you’re interested in seeing how this all went from still assets to something live, do give Wizsnooks a try.
And for those that would like to do their own assets for future game jams, go download Krita. It’s 100% free and constantly updated. It can also be used for sprite work. Like all good tools, it takes a while to understand it, but even with a very cheap digital painting tablet, you could really make your future projects sparkle.
That’s all for now. Whales and Games thank you for reading and for participating in this jam. If you feel like chatting, our Discord channel is live. Cheers! ?
