Astral is a 2D sci-fi action exploration game. You start out as a stranded space traveller on a remote planet, your ship has crashed, your equipment is broken. All you have left are the basic tools to gather resources and create shelter. This is where your journey begins, a new beginning. You must carve out a new life for yourself, explore new frontiers in an endless universe filled with warmongering factions, greedy trade federations and hostile environments on alien planets. Experience space travel in your very own custom built ship, put your mark on the universe with fully destructible environment, battle powerful enemies with fast paced combat using a huge arsenal of customizable weaponry. Everything with real time physics. With Astral, we want to bring you a new sense of exploration and discovery, experienced either on your own or online with your friends.

Post news Report RSS The Artists' Process at Suttung Digital

In this article you can read about the process of creating art for Astral and implementing it into the game.

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Soldier's Light Armor

In earlier posts, we’ve mentioned that we want the game world of Astral to be a world filled with life, and the art plays a pretty big role in achieving this, especially the characters. We worked out an art style that we felt gave the character a lot of soul. This art style includes heavy lines and somewhat comical proportions, among other things. Today we would like to tell you about the process we have worked out for drawing and implementing character art into the game.

Drawing the Suits

Suit Concepts

At the moment, we are working on different suits that you will be able to wear throughout the game. When designing a suit, we start out with a concept to work out the design of the suit as a whole. It is important for us to create gear that is both visually appealing and believable to some degree, meaning that the visual aspect of the gear corresponds to the effect it will have on the wearer. The lower part of a suit that enables the player to jump higher or run faster will be reinforced at the legs, so that the human bone structure of the wearer can withstand the additional strain. Things such as this will make the gear more interesting for the players. Players will also be able to mix suits, so that they recieve multiple effects and become more powerful, as well as adapting their character to their playstyle. This also makes it more difficult for us when designing the suits, because each suit part has to work together with any other, both in terms of aesthetics and animation.
Sketching out the different ideas and concepts for the suits is crucial to the development process because we can easily see what will work and what has to be changed or scrapped entirely. When the design is ready, we use a template that we have made for humanoid characters and draw the assets that we need have a whole suit of armor that can be used in the game. We use photoshop for drawing both the concept sketches and the assets. The humanoid template’s body is split into different parts, this way we have a lot of flexibility when it comes to animating the character.

Animation

Animation Screenshot

For animations, we use Spriter. The template we use when drawing suits is also the template we use to make animations for the humanoid characters. This works pretty well because the suits are split up into the same parts that the template consists of. We have to test each suit so see if it looks good with the animation, and this is done by simply swapping out the sprites of the template with the sprites of the suit that’s being tested. If there is something that doesn’t look quite right, we make adjustments to the suit in photoshop.

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