I'm Marc, programmer and game designer on Woodland Rebels, and in this post I wanted to go a bit more into the details of our artistic process.
As mentioned on our Steam page, our art is completely human-made, and we do not use any generative AI. So I was hoping that with this post I can give you a better idea of all the steps that we go through to create new art assets.
Our Artists
We have 3 artists currently working on the game and 1 animator.
Helen is our lead artist and environment artist. She draws most of the environment, including trees, plants, food items, rocks, terrain, houses, and the UI. She is also the one in charge of adjusting the art to keep it consistent across artists.
Eryono is our character and prop artist, he draws most of the characters, and also a lot of the weapons, tools, and crafting stations.
Gongor came more recently in the project to make the Capsule Art and help with a few characters such as the Yeti and Fire Jaguar boss (not in the demo but can be seen in the trailer).
Nacht is our character animator. He uses Spine Animation software to create 2D bone animations.
The Process
Since the most complex process is for drawing the characters, I will focus on it in this post. It takes around 6 different steps to create a new character and 4 different people are involved in the process.
Step 1 - Sketch (Eryono)
Making a sketch first is quite important to make sure everyone is on the same page and that the character is going to look how we imagine. So we always start with a sketch, which is sometimes adjusted a few times before moving on to the next step.
Step 2 - Colors (Eryono)
Once the sketch is approved, Eryono will complete his part by drawing the full character with colors. This is done in Clip Studio Paint on a drawing tablet.
Step 3 - Outline and Color Adjustment (Helen)
At this step, Helen will take over and adjust the colors and outline to make the art fit with other existing objects in the game. One good example of this is for wood objects, we have a lot of objects made of wood (such as the hammer in this image) and it wouldn't look very good if all the wood colors were different. So this is an important step to make sure that our art stays consistent across assets made by different people. She uses an Ipad as drawing tablet and draws in Photoshop.
Step 4 - Split the art to prepare for animation (Marc)
In this step I take the PSD file and then export the individual layers to prepare them for rigging and animation. Sometimes I need to combine layers or split them into new layers. Or adjust a few parts (in this example I split the arms into the upper-arm and lower-arm) to make sure they can rotate properly when animated. I use the Gimp software to do this.
Step 5 - Rigging and Animation (Nacht)
Nacht will then take the split PNG layers and integrate them in Spine Animation, a 2D bone animation software, for rigging and animation. Sometimes we also reuse rigs from previous characters. For example the human enemies all share the same set of animations as they have a very similar rig. In this case the rig is adjusted to fit the new character while preserving original animations.
Step 6 - Unity Integration (Marc)
Spine Animation can export the character to a JSON file with a texture. Which can then be imported into the Unity game engine. In Unity I will create a prefab for each character, which contains the character information (such as stats like attack damage, movement speed, hp and more).
Timelapse
Here are some timelapse made by our artists.
Eryono drawing the Spider enemy character (Step 2).
Eryono drawing new skin variations for the Feline species
Gongor updating the capsule art for an upcoming Steam event (Birds of Play)
Hopefully this was useful to understand our artistic process. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the Steam Forum or on our Discord.