Artwork Progress

[NewCreature]

It's been a while since I've worked on anything related to Paintball Party 2. I was hoping someone would step up and do the character artwork. Since it looks like that's not going to happen I decided to start piecing them together myself. To start off I made the standard paintball gun which will be the weapon all default characters carry:



I'm going to be posting the artwork as I get it done in this thread as a sort of development blog. Comments and criticism are welcome. Progress will probably be slow as I am a slow at graphical work. I want to develop the default roster of characters (16 total) so we can play the game as it was meant to be played with the new gameplay mechanics.

Once the characters are done I will start on the new level artwork and level designs. I will do a minimum of 6 levels to be part of the basic package.

If anyone is interested in working on these aspects of the game feel free to let me know. I would love to bring some other talent on board for this project. The game will get done regardless but I want to give others the opportunity to be a part of this project.

[FlipCoder]

I'm not sure how much I can help with graphics, however, I may have some ideas on how to make this process easier and ultimately more scalable.

Maybe make characters buildable/customizable, e.g. have different heads, clothing, etc. all fitting to some sort of overall template which contains the frames and animation.
This would make it way easier to have a wide variety of characters without having to do too much on the graphics side. Also its easier for a community member to contribute something simple like a hat or clothing style for a character instead of reanimating everything.

Also, if you're dealing with weapons, you could look for pictures of different paintball guns of the web and use those as a basis for the design side. You could even extract the shape of the guns to use as templates much like the characters. These types of "lazy" methods of design are perfect for people like us.
Also, easy customization is a good feature for games with online profiles.

[NewCreature]

Thanks for the tips! The character stuff is already similar to what you suggested. Each character is comprised of several parts so you don't have do draw full animations for everything. You can draw the legs walking, standing, etc. and use the same torso and head throughout. That is what I'm going to be doing for the characters I'm making. Your idea just takes it a little further.

I plan on including all the graphics sources (the SVG files) with the final game so others will have some stuff to start modding with. Also, maybe there could be a pool of character parts that people could use to piece together new characters without having to draw everything themselves.

As for guns, I am still using ammo types so each character will be confined to one gun type. The gun will be part of the character as before.

Edit: Here's the last bit of work I got done:



This is my WIP character face. It still needs work but it's a good start. Once I get a good face made I should be able to easily make modifications to get all 16 character faces. When I finish the first face I'll start work on the torso. I won't be able to do any more until I get back from vacation.

[NewCreature]

Still working on the base character graphic. I drew up the rest of the body and put everything together to see what it would look like:



Not too bad. The leg and hand look a little off, just needs a little tweaking and then some nice shading. I'll probably do the animation first because I'm anxious to see this in action in the game.

[FlipCoder]

nice, it's looking really good!
are you gonna do all the shading with inkscape too or is that done afterwards?

[NewCreature]

I'm going to do everything in Inkscape.

[NewCreature]

Not much progress to speak of yet. I've found that in order to make manipulating the arms and legs for animations workable I will have to change how I draw. For another project I did some artwork and found that I need to draw the overall shape of whatever I'm drawing and then draw the outlines. In InkScape it's just a matter of duplicating the object and changing the properties to no fill and whatever outline style I want. This means I'm going to have to redo the character using this new method in order to be able to animate anything in a timely manner.

What I'll probably end up doing is finding a walking or running animation or video and create a skeletal model that places the joints for all the animation frames in the correct locations. Once I have the skeleton animating smoothly I can draw the body over the skeleton. I will do this in stages so that I actually feel like I'm making progress. I'll use the bare skeleton to make a test character to use in the game. This will give me an idea of how the animations will look in-game. After that I will draw the non-shaded version of the actual character, render it, and test it in-game. The final stage will be adding the outlines and shading. Hopefully I'll have some stuff to post in the next week or two.

[NewCreature]

I did some work on the running skeleton animation today. Here's what it looks like:



I think it looks pretty decent and will be a good basis on which to build the actual character animation. I will be redrawing the character legs using the new method I described in a previous post. If all goes well I will be posting the actual leg animation on Friday.

[NewCreature]

Here's the latest:



Still needs a little work (some of the legs are too skinny) but this is coming along nicely.