My company is reviving its videogame deparment and our next project will be a Bomberman-like game involving toy tanks in ancient Egypt with roguelike elements (that's a mouthful). It's being made in Unity and primarily aimed at Windows 8. We don't have anything particularly original or impressive to show so far (which is why I shied away from the dedicated art/gameplay sharing topics), but I thought it would be a good idea to log our progress nonetheless.
I've always been a programmer, but this time my dreams came true and I was finally allowed to be the ~artist~. So far, my contributions consist of lots of concept sketches on napkins and a few 3D models.
For example, this is what the player's basic tank looks like. I'll be reworking that texture eventually, getting rid of the cel shading and adding a specular map.
Ever wondered where tanks came from? Cardboard boxes that fall from the sky, of course. Specular needed.
A key gameplay mechanic is that your tank can "evolve" by finding gems. These are the first two stages of evolution (out of four). Again, I'm not too fond of the cel shading.
The programmer hasn't moved on to 3D yet so for now we're using these isometric renders. In order to streamline the rendering of isometric sprites, I've set up 8 cameras, one for each direction, with an overhead light.
Whenever I update a model, all I have to do is go through each camera, select it as active, and render the animation to PNG frames. I'm using compositing to add a black border around each sprite.
Once I have all the frames in separate files, I run a Node.JS script which uses ImageMagick to assemble all of them into sprite sheets.
Eventually I hope to move on to a more TF2-ish art style. By the way, apologies for not posting any screenshots of the current prototype, but I don't have it - I'm just the artist. (I've always wanted to say that.) I'll ask the programmer tomorrow.
I'll be updating this thread once a week or so. Next up is the player character and the environments, and hopefully a gameplay gif. Feedback is always welcome.
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