Legacy of Suns

Welcome back to the Dev Log. Today I talk about the difficulties of being distracted by great games, as well as how hard it is to make a door (for me at least).

Today I worked on a door. For like an hour. Man, pixel art is hard sometimes! Especially having no experience.

I wanted to start making some tiles/backgrounds for a couple different reasons. The first reason is that, It’s kind of hard to start making things in a game engine when I have no resources or things to put into said game engine. I’m sure I could start with just some generic tiles found for free use online, but I think it would be better to have some tiles I made myself to start building a game with.

The second reason is that the website could definitely use some updates. The more art I can put on the homepage, the easier it is for people to recognize the purpose.

So, I tried to draw a door. Really my goal was a house, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the door look good. After a while of trying without any help, I looked online for a couple pixel art door images to base my work off of, and that still wasn’t super helpful because I don’t want to just copy other people’s work!

After that, I decided I’d boot up Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster to get some inspiration from the games that I love most. Those were pretty helpful, and made me realize my sprite dimensions were off. To make thinks not look super blocky and chunky, they have their character sprites (a majority of the time)set to 16 width 32 height, rather than 32×32.

Once I had this realization (and spent 2 hours getting distracted starting a ng+ file on Chrono Trigger), I went back to my Oskar sprite and touched it up a bit. It definitely needs more work, and that has helped me figure out how I want to shape the doors, how wide and tall they should be, how many tiles should a door be, things like that.

For anyone wondering what a tile is, at least what I think a tile is, it’s usually a set width and height (some games do 16×16 some do 32×32 from what I’ve seen) that you make a block for a specific purpose. Then, using the tiles you’ve made, you put them together to make an object or a path or a dungeon.

I really don’t want to post these images (because it’s still very rough), but the whole point of the blog is to see progress. Here’s my couple hour attempt at making a door. Hopefully I can make it look cleaner in the future! Next steps, make house tiles, and put together a couple houses. That will probably go in tandem with some grass tiles and path tiles.

Hopefully the art will look better in the next dev log!