Operation Hardcore: Powered by Awesome PixelsHey everyone! Ricardo here!
As Adam pointed out in the last update, I've joined the Operation with the sole purpose of making it even more Hardcore?. I'm going to lend my graphic design and pixel art skills to this amazing project and aid with promotional art, so I think now is a good time to share with all of you a bit of the work I'm doing. Prepare for old-school pixel goodness!
Evolution of the Badasses
The player character sprite is arguably the most important graphical asset in the game. For that reason the first thing I did when I took on the role of artist for the game was to iterate on the characters, starting with our first Badass, to whom we shall refer as "Army".
At first (for prototyping and testing purposes) the game used some assets from open/free game art libraries. While this assets are not bad per se, they lack the custom look and personality we want to implement. In short: This dude doesn't look at all like our Army concept. Not hardcore enough!
Later on, before I joined the team, Adam worked with the folks at m07games, who crafted original badass sprites for the game, including Army.
While the sprites they pushed were a clear improvement and a step in the right direction, Adam still wanted to improve the look and feel of the character. So I took m07's Army as a starting point and refined the sprite further.
The refinements in the pixel art aim to improve the silhouette and contrast of the sprite. Since we're using small sprites and then scaling them up for a retro-feel, it's important to cram as much detail as possible while still keeping readability high and projecting the desired personality for the character.
The animation was also tweaked with additional frames to make the walk/run cycle smoother, and more Hardcore. The arm was also given more muscle, 'cuz, y' know, Army is a pretty buff operative!
Cool, but what about the other graphics?We want to push the look of the game as far as possible, so improvements are being made all around to make levels, enemies and the overall aesthetic way more interesting! Here you can see some of the improvements made:
I hope you like my work for Operation Hardcore, and if you like it, please share it with your friends and your social networks! We also have a dedicated Twitter and Facebook now, so follow us to keep up to date with the project! Support the badasses against the aliens! Become a part of this Operation and be a HARDCORE!
Peace! Ricardo out!
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