Art of Greedventory
Greetings, heroes! Welcome to the latest Greedventory devlog, this time focusing on art, animation, and other effects we used to make the world of Greedventory come alive.
As you probably already noticed, Greedventory is a very art-intensive project. Everything here is done in high-detail pixel art and since the game is combat-oriented, we encountered a lot of challenges for implementation and organising the work processes.
Both of these reasons led us over time to creating rather complicated art pipelines, which went through lots of iterations and transformations before the current state. Pipelines are key in gamedev overall, all your planning and estimates and the very possibility of delivering the game can easily be put into question until you find the right workflow process, and also many problems are solved through them.
We can say with a lot of pride that we have a small but magnificent team of artists working on the game, so let's take a dive into some of WHAT they do and HOW they actually do it.
Animations
When it comes to pixelart, especially the very detailed kind we're drawing here, one could never overemphasise the amount of work done by hand. When it comes to ANIMATED pixelart - and your only option here is frame-by-frame animation - this workload grows exponentially. Especially with the large enemies and bosses - there is SO MUCH TO DRAW.
But then again, the game is about combat, so the attack timing, the wind-ups, the subtle expressions and feel of it all should be perfect. So when we used a more standard pipeline - concept, drawing, then assembling in the game, and then balancing - all the tweaks were made after drawing all those large spritesheets, so it was a huge pain for the whole team to figure out.
Over time we've tried a lot of tricks, workarounds and just overall learned to streamline and improve this process, and the last version of it is what worked best, so, here goes:
First, of course, come the concepts.We come up with an idea of who the character will be, what they will look like, what weapons they will use, and then the process of finding references, drafts and iterative detail improvements. And a lot of emotional hand-waving over video-calls between the CEO (who happens to also be the game director and visionary) and the Lead Artist.
Things get heated sometimes which is really fun to observe as a side viewer :)
When the concept is ready, what we actually have is one sprite (or an idle animation) of the character, so to make him able to fight vigorously we still have lots to do.
Here’s what happens next:
Firstly, the new enemy (or boss) attacks are designed in a special Dummy tool. No visuals here for now, the attacks are displayed with knives, and the game designer has ability to change and tune attack patterns. This helps to understand the timing and dynamics and variety of the attacks.
After that comes the concept of animation - only stick figures, nothing is drawn in pixel art for now. This stage defines the animation dynamic, and serves as the draft, the skeleton on which the actual flesh will be drawn after. This step undergoes lots of reviews and discussions and after everybody is happy, we can move on to the next phase.
Well, and now goes the actual sweat and blood - the process of hand-drawing all the frames one by one. (Personally the author of this log still doesn't have a clue how the guys can handle this ;) ). Of course, each move is reviewed during this step and some changes can still occur, but the main accent points of the attacks, the timing and the movements are already defined by the previous stages, this is the factor that helps us tremendously.
Backgrounds
Another huge undertaking is backgrounds. While not animated they are still incredibly LARGE and are the primary mood setter in a given location. We've got layered and parallaxed backgrounds here (and some are actually foreground layers :) ). The pipeline here is more conventional - concept and references first, then drawing and tweaking. Still, there are a lot of tricks used and hidden pitfalls which at some point we've fallen into, as well as lessons learned along the way that were used while developing the game further.
For example, when we got to camera shakes and large arenas it appeared that we'd drawn not enough - while shaken vigorously the camera caught the areas around the existing pictures, so we had to expand those on all of the locations we thought were already completed. Oops
One more thing to note: the parallax is a rather complex undertaking and with our artists being somewhat pedantic, there were often clashes with the programming team on the way the backgrounds are implemented into the game. So we had to give them tooling to be able to assemble the location references in the game engine themselves! Our work then is to expand those into the actual levels, connect everything and make them work. And, of course, to stay vigilant and not mess up the layers! :)
Dynamic Lighting
While we go to great lengths to make sure the art looks great, there are some factors that interact with it that may distort the way we intended it to be seen, like lighting. For example, what happens when some light shines on our pixel-art? A poorly done lightning job might ruin everything the art designers worked on for a long time. So we've put A LOT of hours into technical art too. First of all, to make something able to be dynamically lit you should draw normal maps (so yeah, one more shout out to the pixel guys). And this goes not only for the backgrounds, but for characters and decorations.
And then you have to have a true technomagician who can write clever shaders, which will make this work. Those are really fancy as they can do backlighting and combine lots of light sources.
And there you go, just add lights to your scenes and watch the magic happen.
Also you can try to add a light source on your weapon when it's charmed.
Volumetric Lighting
One more trick in the technical art palette are the Volumetrics. They can add so much atmosphere and feeling to the scene, that once you see them you can never go back to living without them.
Check out the difference and judge for yourself:
Before
After
FXs and post processing
Okay, so we've got the setup, the atmosphere and actual fights, but what makes them _REALLY JUICY_ and enjoyable? Yeah, the visual effects of course.
We use all flavors here - particle systems, shader effects and drawn sprite animations - all of that combined gives us the juiciness of combat and the ability to improve and push it to the needed level.
3D
It's funny to find this out while working on a completely 2D game, but we use 3D a LOT in the working process. Our artists use a handful of tricks with that. For example, some backgrounds can be modelled first to outline the space, the viewing angle, the light, and only then (after conversations and reviews, of course) redrawn by hand into a game sprite based on those reference models. It's still a complex process and unfortunately, you cannot just outline a screenshot with pixels and get a nice result, but it saves time as the main search is done before the pixels are started and brings the overall quality an extra notch up.
Along with that it helps with understanding complex motion, so the objects are often modelled first.
That’s it for this devlog, we hope you had fun getting an inside look into Greedventory’s art processes!
Thank you for tuning time, and we hope to see you in Greedventory very soon! 🙂
–The Greedventory Team