Years of Improvement
Hey guys, this is Bro B (Ben), I work on the sprites for Ancients of Arkar. I thought starting off with a small series where I show the iteration process of working on the character animations would be nice. We've been working on this game for a while, so naturally our skills for the game improve over time. Unfortunately this means older sprites, cutscenes, etc. become outdated and need a 2nd iteration (or sometimes several more!...).
Here is a look at our main character Xiaxen (Zee-ah-zen) and his multiple iterations over the years. You can just see what a difference 5 years makes in terms of clarity and overall animation quality.
The fact that he actually has a face now allowed us to add tons of expression to cutscenes that were sorely missing. You'll also notice the sprites have gotten WAY bigger. The 2020 version was on a 64x64 texture, while the newest is 128x128 texture.
There are other creature types that are different sizes. Typically the bipedal characters are a square texture (eg 128x128), while quadrupedal and various other creatures can be doubled on the x-axis (256x128) - this is to account for their long bodies.
From Facelings to Real People...
If you can believe it, the characters all started off having no faces. As the cutscenes in the game improved, I thought that the sprites need something to help bring them to life. So, I sneakily started adding faces to some of the sprites without letting Bro A know, because I knew he would've said it was too over-scoped to start redoing a ton of sprites (he was only half right, but now he's addicted to the redoes almost as much as I am!).
Well that does it for this dev log. I hope you guys enjoyed the brief preview of sprite iterations. More will come in the future, but they're not only going to be about sprites/animations. Look forward to Bro A's (Andy) posts, as they'll deal with gameplay, story, world building, etc...
Oh and here's a low framerate GIF of Xiaxen climbing a ladder and getting tired, for no reason...
Next post will most likely be Bro A. Thanks for reading and take care!
-Bro B
