Testing two story walls under a nice couple of land scorching suns @AeonOfSands.

Today I add stairs to the cellars, place some fake root made with plasticine and screwed off a couple of lightbulbs, to make it more cozy.

Wow that looked good fast.

heh took me most of a day of work, but I did not get but a few screenshots.

Just a short post, showing the process of pretty much all exploration content creation: I design anything starting from rough shapes of fixed sizes that we figured early on, like the simple stairs here in the second frame, and then draw directly on them, while they are superimposed to the rendition of the actual point where they will be used.

Rinse and repeat for all the various positions on our grid, so basically, a stairway requires the thing you see here below x 12 times (6 upward and 6 downward)

This is marvelously insane! :D

Today I add stairs to the cellars, place some fake root made with plasticine and screwed off a couple of lightbulbs, to make it more cozy.

Resizing to full window, for max use of screenspace, works as it should now, finally!
So, in fullscreen too, you'll get to choose to have this view, or one with the complete user interface skin.

I should have posted this before falling asleep yesterday night, but please consider this a prolonged saturday crawl for me

Ok, 2016 has started and we're one update closer to the release of the game.

Since last one, in december, we have started finally directing towards the fun part of the game, with SiENcE putting together the mazes, and me polishing assets, and starting to create new monsters, which will keep me busy until April, probably..

Yesterday, for instance, I spent partly on testing spells effect, of which half is complete (meaning they do affect the environment, the party or the NPCs).




Also, the last day of last year, I have finally completed the about 220 illustrations that go along the game story. Next, somewhere in Spring, I have to play through all the 100 dialogues along with them.

As we're approaching the last part of the ambient making of the game, I want to show an automated batch in action to create the basic walls of a maze; this part in the gif takes one of of two walls of a set (each wall comes with a pair, a plus one of sort) that I had designed on a different artwork, and deploys it on the perspective grid of the world view.
It applies also a basic distance shading, different for outdoor and indoor.





As this process works well only with flat surfaces, whereas basically all walls in game have protrusions, niches, holes instead, I have then to paint over pretty much all the 8 side views of the wall, for instance here below you can see what I mean in the pillars of the treehouse and in the vegetation.





After that's done, the 12 tiles get exported in their atlas, to be further tweaked with color shader if necessary, or used directly in game.

Beautiful art and concepts! I look forward to this!

Minirats pummeling me in editor mode

It looks mighty gorgeous! I'll follow the development happily! Cool work!

Hello again, I thought to share a basic animation of a doorway, before I get to paint over each frame.

Since this level is an alive underground - excavated by the huge roots of the tree protecting the city where the game starts, and only partly adapted by the citizenship, as a storage area and partly occupied by the disenfranchised of the city above - I wanted some quantities that each dungeon share (levers, doors, alcoves etc) to be living roots or at least framed by roots.

In the case of the door, this proved a bit more difficult than expected as I did not plan for this since the start.
Our normal doors are in fact divided in a static doorframe and a 5 frames animation for the door, a simple sliding (usually but not always) with some perspective and lighting adjustments.

Here I had instead to treat the two parts as one, and thus make all of five frames interact with the rest of the dungeon.

In the end the only added difficulty was to keep all of the corridor background registered correctly, and to keep track of what root goes above, what underneath.

Congratulations on the completion!
I have only a windows phone, so I'm sorry that I can't play it, but the levels colors themes are great, the characters i love since Nuklear Power's 8-bit comics, and the gameplay seems really fun!
 

Hello! I have planned a quiet noght in, what with the new year etc, and I thought to update this thread with the news of the game blog.

The first post is about the NPC development, showing my process from concept to in-game art.
It's here:
http://blog.aeonofsands.com/

As usual, I humbly ask you readers to bear with our rarified posting here, there on the blog, or if you have stumbled on our Fb and G+ pages, there too: we are only two persons and the work on AoS keeps us - me in particularly - relatively slow on the www reading and posting!

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40951.0

I've posted a call for a work for hire / collaboration here on TIG, the link above.

We have been very busy developing the game in the past months, Florian rewrote most of the engine and implemented new cool stuff, that I let him talk about, while I redid the interface, and then had to temporarily stop working on the art, except for odd bits and roughs for more wallsets, to focus on the story and dialogues and their static scenes, about 100 so far, more to come.

Writing was and is very complex, because of the branching structure of them and because they impact greatly how the player will perceive his character, depending on the choices made, not to delve into how they shape the places the player will visit in a single run of the game. It's a learning process, very fatiguing and very rewarding at the same time.

Now, hoping to mostly finishing the dialogues by the end of june, with more static scenes to go with them, I'll can plan for the rest of the graphic work, that is still very large, and I would gladly use an help in finishing the wallsets and spells and projectile animations, which require a more pixelartist's hands than mine.

If you are intereseted in check it, I thank you in advance!

Hello,

Two Bits Kid is looking for a second graphic artist for its game Aeon of Sands - The Trail, aimed to a 2015 released.

http://aeonofsands.com/

WHO ARE WE AND ABOUT THE GAME

- Two Bits Kid is an indipendent studio composed by me, Marco Pedrana, designer, narrator and - so far -  creator of all game’s art, and Florian Fisher, coder;
- the game, is a pseudo 3D rpg à la Eye of the Beholder, coupled with a very large narrative like in the graphic adventures from the early nineties, all done with a graphic style that’s reminiscent of that era, and with the tools available today.
- we aim to mix a storytelling not conventional  to the contemporary rpgs, in style and mechanic, to an apparently old rpg game: an old dog with very new and quirky tricks and twists.


WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

What we look for is a help with graphics of wallsets, or some parts of wallsets and with specific animations.

Currently there’s one complete wallset (walls, backgrounds, buttons, levers, doors, alcoves, holes, other props) plus roughs of other three wallsets.

The graphic style of the game fakes pixel art where it is in truth more drawing oriented.
A more pixel art versed artist would be welcomed, something of a mix between the two approach would be preferred though.

Basically we are looking for a candidate who grasps how wallsets were built back in the Eye of the Beholder era, and who would like to help me on wallsets and spells and projectiles animations.


WHAT DO WE OFFER

We are willing to hire the candidate as junior artist for a collaboration retributed on the amount of work done, so please send us your rates in addition to your candidature and detail.
We would also consider a profit share collaboration if somebody with a style very consistent with the game’s one would come forth and would be interested in a more stable contribution, in a way, that would be the more useful arrangement, considering also that we have plans for the world of Aeon of Sands beyond The Trail’s chapter.
Please do contact us through the site or me directly at
marco.pedrana  at the gmail address

Thank you!

I've tried it at A Maze last friday, it is a great little game!
 

well the style I have clear, since it's for a project I've designed, but the purpose to commit to the whole project on my part was exactly to do things, in a environment that's traditionally made by pixelart (so a builder approach, using a more intellectual/mathematical  way to represent things) with a draftsman/illustrator approach (so more instinctive).

Some item or their function, I'm inventing while I work, so the time grows there too, but that's not a problem, since I will find a reason for them in the game, and addindg content at this stage is all right.

I've done some small pixel art illustration in the past, but nothing on this scale, so I have no reference regards to how much time it would require with that technique.
Hence my question there.

But I don't mind taking this much time, given I'm still in my deadline, to do things with the technique I set myself to.

It's a curiosity, is all.

5 minutes each seems really impressive...

It takes me about 1 to 5 minutes just to design them at 100px, a couple of minutes to do a flat, not aliased silouhette (used for avoid transparency later) and 10 to 20 minutes to paint them... So, 15 to 25 minutes each, add one hour to reduce all and adjust.
All in all, probably more time than a pixelart approach

also re: this
i think taking more time than other with pixel art.. and anything to be honest, comes from a lack of either experience or a need to ever work under a tight schedule, or some combination of the two

you learn to stop being so finnicky and picky about faults when you've only got a set amount of time to work on something

Or that maybe the different way I do the work is what I bring to that work in particular.