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The simplest way to draw something is with pixels, and games have been embracing the pixel art style since it was required. But how exactly does one get all that beautiful art into a game? In short, with time, effort, and talented artists. While I may not be a skilled artist in any regard, I quickly grasped different techniques for creating pixel art and then importing them into Unity. Starting with bare basic drawings in Gimp to a fully-fledged rotoscoped character was quite the journey.
The simplest way to draw something is with pixels, and games have been embracing the pixel art style since it was required. But how exactly does one get all that beautiful art into a game? In short, with time, effort, and talented artists. While I may not be a skilled artist in any regard, I quickly grasped different techniques for creating pixel art and then importing them into Unity. Starting with bare basic drawings in Gimp to a fully-fledged rotoscoped character was quite the journey.
WalkCycles.mp4Moving on from simple pixel objects, one of the first challenges was to make an animated pixel walk. Walk cycles are critical for almost any game, but they are deceptively difficult to draw, especially if each frame is hand crafted from scratch. Later, I was tasked with creating a rotoscoped version of a walk or run. Rotoscoped requires a live actor to do the action required, and then an artist traces over select frames to create the animation frames. The result is a much smoother animation done relatively quickly. The above video depicts the two styles side by side. The left is my 6-frame walk animation created from scratch. The right is a 12-frame rotoscoped walk.
FinalLevel.mp4Meanwhile, we were also given tasks to create parallaxed background & foreground objects. Parallaxing is the technique of objects scrolling past the player at varying speeds, creating an illusion of depth. I used several reference images and traced over them to create the various objects within the level on the left. We also toyed with tilesets, which allow for large sections of a level's space to be filled with color. The platforms are also a tileset, but they are coupled with collision boxes, allowing for the platforming to work.
The underlying systems were found online, as the course was more dedicated to the art pipeline compared to the nitty gritty of game design itself. Still, I had to tinker around within those systems to ensure the whole level functioned correctly.
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