Welcome back followers of the fearsome!
After some shifting around we are back into the groove of rapid prototyping! It’s been refreshing having something as clear to work on as our space title and we’ve been having a blast drumming up ideas for an exciting space shooter.
This week we have some basic weapon ideas for you! In our Star-Razer Redux we want big bosses and tons of cool space weapons so to start here’s four basic ones:
1: The Shield Generator:
We want the shields to be quite active and reliant on the player’s timing and dexterity to be most effective. Our idea is to have the module generate a large blue circle that shrinks back down into the module. While enveloped with the circle (other shield configurations could have different shapes), that part of your ship takes no damage! Perfect for protecting your jarred space-brain!
2. Laser Cannon:
Classic cosmic combat requires us to hack in a serviceable laser weapon. Our idea with these guys is that you can hold them down to deal more damage but they can overheat very easily. When laser cannons overheat they’ll explode right off your ship! Other laser configurations could have different firing patterns or damage types.
3. Missiles:
Big damage but limited usage, basic missiles will pack a punch and track into your enemies but will disintegrate off your ship after the last rocket is fired. We want the player to be constantly losing modules and needing to re-equip themselves frantically. By limiting the amount of shots missile pods have we can hopefully adjust the pace of the enemy waves.
4. Armor Plating:
Sometimes you just need to be able to take a bigger beating. We are hoping something like armor plating could be used to protect more fragile and rare weapon modules. Once their damage capacity has been met they will explode off of your ship. They could very well be to passive for our game but it never hurts to write/draw down some ideas.
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So there’s a few ideas for our basic test modules. We want there to be a lot of different weapons with different behaviors that reflect the race you’ll be tangling with. Part of the fun we want to happen in our space game is chaotic combinations and synergies with all the salvageable weapons you run into. The ideas are all sounding great in theory and it’s a really fun field to brainstorm in.
Next week we’ll have a few more exotic ideas for interacting with your enemies so until them keep those laser cannons searing holes through your foes!
-Jesse
Posted by: Jesse Under: Art Work,Star Razer
Welcome back followers of the fearsome!
It’s Jesse here with some super cool information on how we slay out all our art here at Slick! If this goes by alright we’ll be returning to this format every now and again much like Nick’s “Waanderful-Tech” posts!
To start I thought I’d take you guys through the process of art creation here with a brand new character just for this Dev-Blog post. Now we are still getting some things ironed out with our new project but we’ll stay in the same theme which happens to be a sort of a wacky fairy-tale cartoon world with a slightly dark edge. I like drawing in every genre pretty much but I find that fantasy tends to resonate with people the most, probably because they were raised on all these classic ideas of dragons and swashbuckling. Dragon’s and swashbuckling? That sounds like a great starting point, let’s work on some sort of pirate-dragon!
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Step 1: Rough Ideas, and I mean ROUGH
Now that there’s an idea rattling around in my head I’ll start scribbling down some ideas. This is actually the most fun I have drawing because there’s no rules. Plus a lot of rough sketchy stuff tends to look cooler as your brain has a good time making sense of the messy lines. Here we see that there is definitely some elements that are coming up, we got the classic cutlass in the sash, a parrot atop his tail, and even a nice big hat to emphasize his grizzled head. We’ll make him the first mate and call him Scalesbeard for now.
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Step 2: Refinement Pass with some tighter brushes
Now that Scalesbeard has got it going on we’ll refine him and his parrot friend with a slightly tighter brush and get those ideas less abstract. The entirety of Shellrazer was drawn with 3 Photoshop brushes so we’ll use the same tools to make our sea-faring dragon. I tend to draw mostly from my head when it comes to making stuff for the worlds here at Slick. Reference is always super awesome but when it needs to be done faster I draw from my gut and just get it down. We can see that we added quite a bit of embellishments to those scratchy shapes, the attitudes of the character and his props really start showing up in this phase. Things like the hooked tail and the pistols in the sash are drawn with more confidence because we are more familiar with the character now and can safely say “Sure, Scalesbeard would totally have those!”.
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Step 3: Color and shade that action!
The last pass I usually do for fast stuff like this is going over the refined lines again with a static brush. This brush has no sensitivity and keeps the lines even. I fill everything with flat colors and then throw a 40% black over the whole character and “Scoop” out areas of light with the lasso tool. This may not be the prettiest way of adding dimension but it’s super quick and gets the point across. With our new game in the works I’ve been experimenting with some other styles of shading and coloring but the game will definitely have the same visual feel of Shellrazer. So here’s our first mate Scalesbeard! If he were to be animated I’d start chopping his parts up in a puppet fashion and get to animating a few different states for him.
And there we have it! a quick look at how some goofy stuff gets made up here! I hope you enjoyed this small sample of how art gets done up around here at the Slick office and be sure to tune in next week for another super cool Dev-Blog. Let us know if you’d like to see some more goofy art stuff on here in the comments! And if you too are a fierce drawbarian and have any questions about being an artist on a small team just fire away and I’ll be sure to answer them! Have a great week everybody!
-Jesse
Follow us on twitter: Nick: @nickwaanders Jesse: @jouste SlickEntertainment: @slickentinc
Posted by: Jesse Under: Art Work,Slick Entertainment
